Mining processes control and Virtual Reality

Mining production in underground spaces will be in the near future realized by autonomous systems without human presence. As the production is connected to natural raw materials deposits, where the process environment models and activities cannot be fully determined, the human supervision will be still necessary. Classical process control, with the external system description of the dynamic behavior, uses the transformation of input actions to output reactions for the model design. Similarly for the process visualization the classical methods - SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) systems are used. Modern control theory is based on state representation of systems, caused by the necessity to obtain more information to understand and describe the dynamics of complex system in the control process. Resulting state space model represents the dynamic properties of the system. The behavior of system in the state space is then represented by the state trajectory - given by the values of state variables in the observed time period. The problem is that the state variables, in many cases, do not have the physical dimension and do not describe surrounding environment. The Virtual Reality tools provide the possibility for visualization of such a virtual and complex systems description in special artificial space.