Improving safety of off-highway trucks through GPS

GPS technology is being used efficiently in large open pit mines within truck dispatch systems and field surveying. in large open pit mines, the pit maps and dump maps are being built in real time and can be transferred directly to the on-board computers of the trucks. With the existing GPS equipment already on board, one can quickly determine exact coordinates of a given truck within sub meter accuracy and evaluate if a given truck is dangerously close to the dumping edge of a waste dump. At the Colorado School of Mines there is an ongoing research project on improving truck safety and productivity through GPS and wireless mobile equipment computer network system. This paper will present the current progress on this work and discuss various issues that were needed to overcome in development of a rugged, reliable system.