Cisco says it has helped Sandvik and Boliden deliver a safe, autonomous and efficient operation at the miner’s Garpenberg underground mine in northern Sweden.

The IoT solutions provider has installed a low latency IoT network with Cisco industrial switches and access points in the mine, which is more than 1 km underground, to facilitate this transition.

As Cisco says, Boliden was after a reliable industrial network architecture that can operate in its mine, could allow machinery to operate autonomously to keep workers out of dangerous areas, and could improve operational efficiencies in the mine while reducing costs.

Working with Boliden and Sandvik Mining and Rock Technology, one of Cisco’s first few Design-In Program partners, the company came up with a solution.

The network installed at the mine allows large machinery, such as Sandvik LH517s, to operate remotely and autonomously in areas that could be unsafe to send people. With the support of Sandvik’s AutoMine® for autonomous mining equipment and Sandvik’s OptiMine® software to analyse and optimise production, Boliden mining engineers can remotely (and safely) operate the machinery from a control room, it says.

This also makes it possible for Boliden mining engineers to work in a cleaner, healthier environment, according to Cisco.