PRESS RELEASE: Preliminary estimates have shown that the use of unmanned technologies provides high survey accuracy and increases the speed and safety of work at the site.

A Geoscan 401 Geodesy quadcopter and Geoscan 101 Geodesy aircraft by Geoscan were used for mine and geodetic surveying. There was test mine surveying of the open-pit mine, dump, ore storages and other bulked land objects. The total area of the survey exceeded 3km², and the flight time was 2 hours 40 minutes. To accomplish the assigned tasks, the unmanned aerial vehicles flew a total of about 100km.

The processed results of mine surveying showed high survey accuracy. Severalmaz stated that the resulting measurement error is within acceptable limits with a large margin. Besides that, the use of drones made the survey much faster compared to traditional laser scanning (in one area, the duration of work was reduced from 115 to 65 minutes), and significantly improved their safety.

Igor Ivanov, chief engineer of Severalmaz, said: "Right now, mining companies in our country are only testing the drone-based surveying technology. For Severalmaz, as well as for Alrosa as a whole, this is also the first experience of their use. We still need to do an in-depth analysis of the results, but preliminary estimates show that the use of drones for mine and geodetic surveying can be very promising."

The unmanned aerial vehicles involved in the tests are designed specifically for mine and geodetic surveying and require no special modification.

Alexey Tikhonov, project director of Alrosa's strategic projects and analytics center, noted: "The use of drones for surveying is one of the components for building the concept of digital production at a mining enterprise. The resulting polygonal digital model of the open-pit mine can be used to automate the processes of calculating the volume of excavated rock mass, comparing the current state of mining operations with the mining project, planning of mining operations, and to solve some other tasks."