The challenge: No redundancy for drone operations

King of the Hills faced a common problem across the mining industry. There’s not enough experienced surveyors to go around, so it’s hard to recruit and retain skilled people. 

With a small survey team and limited drone capabilities, they contracted a RocketDNA pilot to give them aerial survey support at KOTH and other neighbouring operations.

"Our pilot was there eight days a fortnight doing tasks like regular stockpile captures. But then he'd be away for six days, and either it wouldn't get done, or they'd have to find someone else but that would take that person away from their core duties," explains Evan McKern, General Manager, RocketDNA.

We see this a lot. FIFO schedules and survey team gaps create periods of downtime with limited or no drone support on site. Busy surveyors are already under pressure to keep up with routine work as well as fitting in extra requests from other departments. At KOTH, this meant the pilot had to focus on core operational priorities while other parts of the mine couldn’t get the aerial imagery that they wanted.

Comparing their options

Determined to improve things, the team at King of the Hills looked at two different paths:

Internal training to upskill more drone operators
One option was to train up internal staff to operate drones. But, this was unappealing for a few reasons. It would require maintaining currency requirements and CASA compliance for multiple operators. Adding more pilots still risks not having coverage during leave periods and adds extra overheads and management headaches. 

Find ways to standardise and automate routine work
They realised that most of their routine drone surveys followed predictable patterns: the same flight paths, process requirements, and delivery schedules. Could this standard work be reliably automated and free up their skilled surveyors to do complex, non-routine tasks?

With the second option seeming promising, they asked us to recommend ways to use automation to give them more coverage and redundancy.
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Our recommendation: Automate the routine work

We agreed that they were on the right path by standardising and automating routine surveys. We suggested they start with daily stockpile surveys because they are frequent, repetitive, and critical to mine operations.

To do that, we recommended a drone-in-a-box system so they could run scheduled surveys that would save the surveyors hours of manual work each day and keep running automatically even when the pilot was away from site.

With this approach, they could:

• Eliminate surveyor coverage gaps during roster breaks 
• Deliver consistent data on time each morning for geology and mining teams 
• Free up the pilot to do complex manual surveys and important jobs at neighbouring operations
• Open up the possibility to capture new information like daily mine panoramas and tailings pipeline inspections
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This hybrid approach wouldn’t replace their existing pilot services. Autonomous drones could give extra coverage to relieve stress on the survey team and free them up for higher-value work and ad-hoc requests from other departments. 
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Implementation: Fast and simple

The KOTH team agreed with our recommendations and asked us to deploy the system.

Our technical team delivered a plug-and-play xBot (drone-in-a-box) on a transportable skid with independent power generation. With our technician there on site to do the set-up, it was ready to go within just a few days.

Keeping the drone communications separate from internal IT networks kept things simple. We set up a Starlink connection with a 4G failover, completely independent of mine infrastructure. All the data flows into a web-based platform where the survey team can manage access for different departments.

Once they connected to power, scheduled flights started running remotely, operated by our qualified commercial pilots in Perth or Adelaide.

We set up our SiteTube platform to give everyone on site easy access to all captured data. The survey team downloads the imagery which becomes available immediately after the flight finishes. They then process it themselves, following their existing workflows.

The most important thing for KOTH is getting accurate and consistent data. Our experience producing mining survey data means our GIS specialists can support them with the quality of data they need.
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Results: More survey capacity, less risk, new data

At first, they automated their stockpile surveys, using the xBot to capture stockpile data every single morning. They couldn’t do this before because of the pilot’s schedule, but now the operations team could rely on consistent data for better reporting and planning.

The KOTH team quickly realised there were other jobs they could automate and schedule. With constant coverage 7 days a week, they now use the autonomous drone for:

• Daily capture of 360° mine panoramas. These are shared across the entire operation for better visibility and quicker, easier planning.
• Daily ROM surveys that enable improved ore blending
• Twice-weekly open pit surveys
• Easily taking on other ad-hoc survey and inspection requests like asset inspections and environmental monitoring

• 25+ scheduled, automated survey flights each week
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The survey team has enjoyed positive feedback from departments across the entire operation. Operations now gets pit scans when they need them. And the geology team appreciates that stockpile data is there early every morning.

"Their response has been very positive. They really appreciate the consistency in the stockpile surveys," Evan says of the feedback from the site.

Now, the survey team isn’t overwhelmed with survey requests. There’s no more difficult conversations about who gets priority. And no more weekend calls about missed deadlines. 

The xBot proved valuable enough that they're expanding from five-day to seven-day drone operations and adding new automated data processing capabilities.

Most importantly, the mine can now plan operations around predictable data delivery, and the survey team can focus on more high-value work. 
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