The Charlatan’s Candice So spoke with Claire Samson, the chair of Carleton’s department of earth sciences, about her research using an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) outfitted with a 3D camera to explore mines and make blasting rock safer and more efficient.
The Charlatan (TC): Can you explain in layman’s terms how the 3D UAV works?
Claire Samson (CS): We do research in the field called imaging, so everything to do with images. And because I’m in the earth science department, usually I like to take images of things like rock tunnels, little rock samples — we call them hand samples, or pieces of rock you can fit in your hand — or road cuts, where you see lots of rock and that sort of thing.
So basically, the core of the research done in my group is about taking images of rocks. We have been successful in getting a research grant with our partners at York University, so this particular research project involves several elements.
One is this totally cool UAV that flies. It’s like a flying saucer. Literally. It looks like a plate that you would eat [off of], and it has four little rotors like a helicopter, and it actually flies.
It has a video camera on-board, so when it flies, it takes videos of what it sees from a certain height. So this UAV is the product of a small company called Aeryon, and they have lent it to us for this project.
It’s so small that nobody, of course, is on board. It’s the project for my master’s student, [Tara McLeod], and she has received training to learn how to fly it. The way she controls is with a little tablet, like a computer tablet — something that looks like an iPad — and by the pointing of the tablet on a map, she can tell it where to go.
We flew over the York campus. Usually we’re not so interested in the urban scene, but our York partners are, so we decided we’d start by that.
TC: So what other things do you anticipate this could be used for?
CS: So now, for us, in the near future, we’re going to fly a second mission because now we know exactly how to do it.
This time, it’s going to be in an open pit mine because we want to do something more involving rock. They have rock exposure, so you can see the rock, and we’re going to fly in the mine.
And the research is we’re going to take images of rocks and try to automatically compute the orientation of the fractures you see in rocks. That’s an idea of how solid the rock is. You can imagine if it’s broken up with a lot of fractures, it’s actually a bit crumbly, and that’s the kind of thing we study.
TC: What’s the helpful point of knowing about the fractures of the rock?
CS: It’s for stability. When people blast road cuts, they want to know that it’s not dangerous, that some pieces won’t detach and roll down on the road. Sometimes it’s perfectly safe to leave the rock as is, and sometimes they put a mesh, and sometimes they blast a wider road cut so that rocks won’t fall on the road.
So there are lots of people who are interested in the fractures of rock. Like in mining, if you have an underground mine and you’re blasting tunnels where people work, well, you’re interested in mapping all the fractures to keep the mining tunnel safe.
TC: Do you see, in the future, any other way this could be used, beyond fractures of rock?
CS: We hope that we will generate interest from the mining industry. When you have an open pit, the way you work on it is that you put the dynamite, then it explodes a bit, then rocks detach from the wall and fall on the ground. Then you take machinery and remove the rock.
So there are people operating that sort of thing who are very interested in knowing, after a blast, how much rock actually detaches and falls. So they want to know the volume of displaced rock, so that helps them tune the dynamite.
TC: There’s been some comparison made between this UAV project and Google Earth. Could there possibly be any privacy objections in an urban setting if people were using the UAV?
CS: Yes, they would, and rightly so. But [with this project at York University], when they capture someone on video, they have software that replaces the actual person by what they call an avatar. It’s like a little dummy person. So you see a person moving on your video and on your software, but you cannot say, “oh, this is Joe.” You can say, this is a person moving. So of course the confidentiality issue is something that everybody is taking very seriously.
TC: What advice would you have for students who do want to become researchers in the future?
CS: Well, I think the world is open to them. I think they should talk to a lot of professors and ask them what they have to offer for research.
And the number one thing to decide when embarking on research degrees like the master’s and PhD is to find the topic that the person is passionate about. I think that’s the key to success.
Let’s face it, this is research, so some days things are hard, things are not working on first attempt, and it’s the passion that carries the person through all the difficulties and make it very rewarding at the end.
So my advice to students is to get a lot of information, talk to a lot of people and find something they really are passionate about. q
This interview has been edited and condensed.