An Adaptive Data Driven Model for Characterizing Rock Properties from Drilling Data

Autonomous operation of blast hole drill rigs requires monitoring of drilling parameters known as "Measurement While Drilling" (MWD) data. From these data, rock properties can be inferred. A supervised classification scheme is usually used to map MWD data inputs to rock type outputs given some labeled training data. However, the geology has no definite ground truth that can allow a reliable labeling of the training data, nor is there a clear input-output pair connection between the MWD data and the rock types. In this paper, an adaptive unsupervised approach is proposed to estimate the rock types in a data driven way by minimizing the entropy gradient of the characterizing measure - "Optimized Adjusted Penetration Rate" (OAPR). Neither data labeling nor fixed model parameters are required because of the data driven nature of the algorithm. Experimental results illustrate the effectiveness of our solution.