ALROSA’s Subsidiary Severalmaz Conducts Pilot Tests of Drones For Mine Surveying

ALROSA group company PJSC Severalmaz tested “unmanned aerial vehicles”, the parent Company said, “for mine surveying of land objects of Lomonosov Mining and Processing Division”. The drones used in the pilot test included a Geoscan 401 Geodesy quadcopter and aGeoscan 101 Geodesy aircraft by Geoscan. During the tests the open-pit mine, dump, ore storages and other bulked land objects were surveyedcovering a total area of over 3 square kms, with a flight time of 2 hours 40 minutes. However, in order to accomplish the assigned tasks, the drones flew a total of about 100 km. “Preliminary estimates show that the use of unmanned technologies provides high survey accuracy, increases the speed and safety of work,” ALROSA declared. The Company elaborated thatthe measurement error is “within acceptable limitswith a large margin”; adding that the use of drones made the survey much faster compared to traditional laser scanning. It asserted that for one of the tasks, the duration of work ...