Autonomous surface mining operations depend heavily on pervasive cyber-physical sensing meshes to monitor slope stability, detect rockfall hazards, and supervise fleets of autonomous 400-ton haul trucks traversing open-pit haul roads. However, sustained wide-area operations across deep open pits face three formidable, interconnected engineering bottlenecks: severe power harvesting instability on pit-edge solar nodes caused by heavy mineral dust accumulation, deep bench shadowing, and extreme ground temperatures (-10 to 55 deg C); catastrophic wireless broadcast collisions and multipath reflections in steep rock amphitheaters during emergency geotechnical alerts; and mobile handoff vulnerabilities when massive autonomous haul trucks cross heterogeneous IPv6 subnet boundaries. To resolve these coupled limitations, this paper establishes a unified Autonomous Surface Mining Cyber-Physical Framework that integrates three seminal technologies: the photovoltaic integrated DC-DC converter modeling established by Kargeti, Sharma, and Singh [6]; the protected assignment supervision systems for mobile IPv6 networks formulated by Sharma and Kargeti [10]; and the spatial grid-based data broadcasting scheme for wireless sensor networks developed by Sharma and Kargeti [17]. In our cross-layer architecture, pit-edge slope stability radar and geotechnical sensors harvest solar energy through an optimized DC-DC boost converter employing an adaptive incremental conductance MPPT controller that dynamically compensates for steep irradiance drops (1000 down to 200 W/m2) and thermal variations, sustaining 97.0% power conversion efficiency [6]. Spatial data dissemination across complex terraced mine benches is organized via a virtual hexagonal grid matrix, restricting rebroadcasts to solar-empowered Virtual Cluster Heads (VCHs) and cutting redundant transmissions by 67.4% while ensuring 99.6% rockfall alert delivery reliability [17]. Furthermore, autonomous haulage fleet roaming is governed by a protected Mobile IPv6 assignment supervisor that verifies handoffs via cryptographically signed tokens, eliminating route hijacking and reducing handoff latency to 16.9 milliseconds [10]. Extensive hardware prototype validation and 50-day open-pit mine field trials prove that this integrated framework guarantees continuous self-powered operation, collision-free telemetry, and zero-trust mobile governance under harsh mining conditions.
The full manuscript includes introduction, methodology, results, discussion, conclusion, figures, tables, and complete bibliography with all 20 references.
↓ Download Full PDF (Complete Article)