From pit progress to stockpile reconciliation, haul-road condition to rehabilitation reporting — drone LiDAR turns the mine site into a measurable, repeatable dataset. Captures take hours, not weeks, and never stop the trucks rolling.
Each capture is geo-referenced to the same survey control, so the difference between any two surfaces is a deterministic number — not an estimate. The volume bar tracks against the annual plan; the period delta is what the mine planner reports to the General Manager at month-end.
Repeatable monthly capture. Each LiDAR pass is geo-referenced to the same control, so reconciliation becomes deterministic — the difference between two surfaces, not an argument between two spreadsheets. Schematic shown at 1 svg unit ≈ 2.6 m; real captures resolve to ±20 mm vertical.
Reconciliation cycles are slow, capture is dangerous, and the data that drives the decisions is rarely fresh. Traditional survey methods compete with operations for site access and rarely keep up with the production pace.
A surveyor walking a stockpile gets a handful of breaklines and a base ring — the volume that drops out depends on the assumed base plane more than the pile itself.
Monthly reconciliation that arrives three weeks after month-end is operationally useless. Decisions have already been made on stale numbers, and corrections are after-the-fact.
Surveying a pit floor or a fresh dump face puts personnel inside the operational footprint. Every capture adds exposure — for data that's already going stale by the time it's plotted.
When the mine plan, the geological model, and the surveyor's spreadsheet all disagree, the project pays for the argument — in delayed claims, contested invoices, and lost confidence in the numbers.
Drone LiDAR captures the full operational envelope — pit, dumps, haul roads, ROM, WROM and stockpiles — in a single mobilisation, without stopping operations or sending crews onto live faces. Every surface is geo-referenced to the same control. Every month after that is a deterministic comparison.
Full surface capture of every stockpile to ±1.5% volume accuracy, with the base plane derived from prior captures or design — not assumed.
Same flight plan, same control, every capture. Bench advance, depth progression and material moved drop out as a deterministic comparison.
Roll, crossfall, rut depth and water-pooling risk derived from the same LiDAR pass. Maintenance prioritisation moves from operator complaint to engineering data.
Change detection on dump faces and tailings storage facilities flags batter creep, settlement and freeboard loss between captures.
Pre- and post-rehabilitation surfaces with batter angles, surface roughness and revegetation cover — ready for closure reporting and regulator submission.
Drone airspace is segregated from the haul fleet. Captures run above active operations with no production interruption and no personnel on unstable ground.
Outputs are formatted for direct use in the mine planning, geological modelling and reconciliation tools the technical services team already runs.
Full classified cloud — ground, structures, vegetation, vehicles, noise — for direct ingestion into Maptek, Surpac, Micromine, Vulcan, Leapfrog.
Bare-earth surfaces at 0.1–0.5 m grid resolution, ready for design overlay and period-on-period comparison.
Per-pile volumes against the chosen base plane (prior capture, design or constructed), with signed summary suitable for finance and audit.
Heat-mapped surface change between captures — material moved, bench advance, dump growth — colour-coded by elevation delta.
Crossfall, rut depth, gradient and width along every haul road. Maintenance prioritisation based on engineering data, not driver feedback.
Period-on-period change detection on tailings facilities and dumps — batter creep, settlement, crest movement — flagged at the cell level.
First capture sets ground control, flight plan, surface model and reconciliation baseline. Subsequent captures re-use all of it.
Single-mobilisation drone flight covering pit, dumps and stockpiles. Airspace coordinated with site SSE. No production interruption.
Trajectory correction, classification, control validation. Independent QA against prior capture before any delivery.
Surface differencing, stockpile recompute, dump comparison. Signed reconciliation pack lands in technical services within 48 hours.
We work with mining operations across WA, NT, SA, Qld and NSW. Tell us the site, the reporting cycle and the deliverable standard your finance and technical teams require — we'll scope a capture programme that hits both.