Industrial Safety&Disaster Relief

Coalmine is one of the most important industries in China and the safety of mineworkers becomes the first issue for people to consider. We have developed a prototype system for mineworker location and tracking. The system also provides wireless voice communication and anomaly detection. We focus on wireless communication in the tube under mine and location algorithm for moving mineworkers and machines in this system.

Approach

We provide a three-layer wireless sensor network in this system. The first layer is over ground and constructed by Ethernet and the data from underground will be accessed to the local monitor center and be visited from Internet. The second layer is composed by underground stations and wireless stations. The data from the wireless station will be transmitted to the underground station via cable and then to over-ground main station by main cable. Numbers of portable wireless nodes carried by mineworkers compose the micro wireless sensor network. The location and environment information is reported to the wireless stations periodically.

Accomplishments

Xiaoguang Niu, Xi Huang, Ze Zhao, Yuhe Zhang, Dong Li, Chunli Hui, Changcheng Huang and Li Cui. The Design and Evaluation of a Wireless Sensor Network for Mine Safety Monitoring. IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference (GLOBECOM'07), Washington DC, USA, Nov. 26-30, 2007.

Future Directions

In future, we will industrialize the prototype to a practical system by collaborating with coalmine corporation and apply this system to real situation.