CPS: Synergy: Collaborative Research: Enabling Smart Underground Mining with an Integrated Context-Aware Wireless Cyber-Physical Framework

为了减少对其他国家矿产(如煤炭、稀土金属)的依赖，美国近年来看到了采矿活动的活跃。不幸的是，矿工们经常不得不在危险的环境中工作，那里有矿井爆炸、火灾、有毒气体和隧道洪水的危险。在过去的十年里，矿难已导致500多名美国矿工和4万多名全球矿工丧生。这些事故大多发生在结构多样的地下矿山，地下矿山有着广泛错综复杂的相互连接的隧道，随着采矿进程和机械的重新定位，环境不断变化，使搜索和救援工作复杂化。认识到问题的严重性，2006年通过的《矿山改善和新应急法案》要求矿山监测甲烷、一氧化碳、烟雾和氧气的水平，以警告矿工空气中毒、火灾或爆炸可能造成的危险。该法案还规定了在事故发生后迅速、安全地做出反应的计划，包括双向、有线或半有线跟踪和通信系统，这些系统可以在被困和洪水泛滥的紧急情况下拯救生命。但部署这种安全基础设施的高昂成本，鼓励今天的公司只满足最低限度的保障措施。该项目将涉及变革性、基础性和协同性研究，这是克服地下采矿环境中的监控、通信和跟踪挑战所必需的，以实现可在任何类型的地下矿山部署的具有成本效益的安全基础设施。这样的框架不仅将使当今美国数十万矿工面临的风险降至最低，而且基础性研究成果也将适用于智能和互联社区领域的广泛应用(S；这一提议的主要目标是设计、设计、原型和测试一种全新的无线网络物理框架，包括低成本、高能效和可靠的传感器节点和用于监控、跟踪和通信的商用智能手机，以提高井下矿工的安全。这个协同项目有助于实现网络物理系统所需的科学和工程原则，并寻求在三个研究方向的交叉点上发展：质量感知语音和数据流、移动计算辅助位置跟踪和计算电磁学驱动的无线信号表征。这三项工作(1)引入了新的机制，使高质量的语音流和环境传感器数据流能够在嘈杂的地下环境中工作的传感器节点的低功率无线网状网络中共存；(2)开发位置查询的能量高效调度和容错室内定位方案，以定位井下个人和矿工群体；以及(3)基于真实矿井的测量，通过电磁建模表征高度复杂和不确定环境中的无线信号行为，以指导无线节点在采矿隧道中的最佳布置。不仅是这些冲刺作为一个整体的汇聚，而且为每个冲刺开发的技术和见解都是变革性的，超越了传统的方法。与一家矿业公司合作进行技术转让将使拟议的研究能够迅速在现实世界中部署。这项研究的更广泛影响将把研究成果紧密地整合到所有级别的教学中，包括研究生、本科和K-12教育；扩大妇女和少数族裔学生对网络物理研究的参与；并将研究纳入现有课程和新课程的教学大纲。

To reduce reliance on other countries for minerals (e.g., coal, rare-earth metals), the USA has seen an invigoration of mining activity in recent years. Unfortunately, miners often have to work in dangerous environments where there is risk of mine explosions, fires, poisonous gases, and flooding in tunnels. Mine accidents have killed over 500 US and 40,000 mine workers worldwide in the past decade. Most of these accidents occurred in structurally diverse underground mines with extensive labyrinths of interconnected tunnels, where the environment continually changes as mining progresses and machinery is repositioned, complicating search and rescue efforts. In recognition of the severity of the problem, the Mine Improvement and New Emergency Response Act passed in 2006 mandated mines to monitor levels of methane, carbon monoxide, smoke, and oxygen to warn miners of possible danger due to air poisoning, fire, or explosions. The Act also mandated plans to rapidly and safely respond in post-accident scenarios, involving two-way, wired or semi-wired tracking and communication systems that could save lives during entrapment and water inundation emergencies. But the high cost of deploying such a safety infrastructure encourages companies today to meet only the bare minimum required safeguards. This project will involve transformative, foundational, and synergistic research that is necessary to overcome monitoring, communication, and tracking challenges in the underground mining context, to realize a cost-effective safety infrastructure that can be deployed in any type of underground mine. Such a framework will not only minimize the risks facing hundreds of thousands of miners in the USA today, but the foundational research outcomes will also be applicable to a wide range of applications in the realms of Smart and Connected Communities (S&CC) and Internet of Things (IoT), wherever the emphasis is on creating smart workplaces, sustainably operating in harsh environments, and improving human safety.The principal objective of this proposal is to devise, design, prototype, and test a fundamentally novel wireless cyber-physical framework of low-cost, energy-efficient, and reliable sensor nodes and commodity smartphones for monitoring, tracking, and communication, to improve miner safety in underground mines. This synergy project contributes to the science and engineering principles needed to realize Cyber-Physical Systems and seeks to grow at the intersection of three research thrusts: quality-aware voice and data streaming, mobile computing assisted location tracking, and computational electromagnetics driven wireless signal characterization. These three thrusts (1) introduce novel mechanisms to enable the co-existence of high quality voice streams with environmental sensor data streams in low-power wireless mesh networks of sensor nodes operating in noisy underground environments; (2) develop schemes for energy-efficient scheduling of location queries and error-tolerant indoor localization to locate individual miners and groups of miners underground; and (3) characterize wireless signal behavior with electromagnetic modeling in highly complex and uncertain environments, based on measurements from a real underground mine, to guide optimal placement of wireless nodes in mining tunnels. Not only is the convergence of these thrusts novel as a whole, but also the techniques and insights developed for each thrust are transformative and go beyond conventional approaches. Collaboration with a mining company for technology transfer will enable rapid real-world deployment of the proposed research. The broader impacts of the research will tightly integrate research results into all levels of teaching, including graduate, undergraduate, and K-12 education; broaden the participation of women and minority students in Cyber-Physical research; and integrate research into the syllabi of existing and new courses.