Robominers

Robominers is an innovative project where 14 different partners from 11 different countries put all their professional ability to create a new mining ecosystem to facilitate EU access to mineral raw materials with a new bio-insipired robominer. In the project there is combined novel ideas from different fields of science and technology sectors.

The robot will be bio-inspired, modular and reconfigurable which can access small and difficult deposits. The robot is equiped with selective mining perception and different mining tools. The robot can mine underground, underwater or slurry environments.

In this project Tampere University Hervanta campus has a major responsibility of designing and building this bio-inspired robot concept with co-operation of other partners. Also in Tampere University will be researched locomotion system of the robot, pressure tolerance of different components (electrical and structural) and communications of different modules (examble packet radio).

The European Union is dependend on raw materials import from other countries. At the same time European Unions industry is using more and more raw materials. The European Union wants to find new ways to increase domestic supply and profitable mining operation for these raw materials.

In EU there is many old abandoned mines and also deep mines which contains still valuable raw materials (including critical minerals) which are not profitable with todays mining systems. Here Robominers presents a solution to re-open many abandoned mines with low cost and ecology.

• Construct a fully functional bio-inspired and modular mining robot prototype
• Design a new mining ecosystem around this robominer
• Validating all key functions of the robot-miner to a Technology Readiness Level (TRL) 4
• Use the prototype to study different challenges which concerns scalability, resilience, re-configurability, self-repair, collective behavior, operation in harsh enviroments and selective mining. Also advance these future research

Robominers provide new innovations, research and new technologies for EUs mining industry. That is how EU can re-open and mine old and deep mines to be more independent from different raw materials, and also to provide new mining eco-system which is ecological and economical to EU and its environment.

ROBOMINERS is a new project funded under the European Union’s Research and Innovation programme Horizon 2020 (grant agreement n°820971) which aims at creating a bio-inspired robot capable of mining underground mineral deposits.

Universidad Politecnica De Madrid (UPM)