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，美国近年来大力发展矿业活动。不幸的是，矿工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，矿难已经造成500多名美国矿工和4万名世界各地的矿工死亡。这些事故大多发生在结构多样的地下矿山中，这些地下矿山有大量错综复杂的相互连接的隧道，随着采矿的进行和机械的重新定位，环境不断变化，使搜救工作复杂化。由于认识到问题的严重性，2006年通过的《矿井改进和新紧急反应法》要求矿井监测甲烷、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快速、安全响应的计划，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淹没的紧急情况下挽救生命。但是，部署这种安全基础设施的高昂成本，促使如今的企业只满足最低限度的安全要求。该项目将涉及变革、基础和协同研究，这是克服地下采矿环境中监测、通信和跟踪挑战所必需的，以实现可部署在任何类型地下矿山的经济有效的安全基础设施。这样的框架不仅可以最大限度地降低当今美国数十万矿工面临的风险，而且基础研究成果也将适用于智能和互联社区（S&amp；CC）和物联网（IoT）领域的广泛应用，无论其重点是创建智能工作场所，在恶劣环境中可持续运行，并提高人类安全。本提案的主要目标是设计、设计、原型和测试一种全新的无线网络物理框架，该框架由低成本、节能、可靠的传感器节点和商用智能手机组成，用于监控、跟踪和通信，以提高地下矿山矿工的安全性。该协同项目有助于实现网络物理系统所需的科学和工程原理，并寻求在三个研究重点的交叉点上发展：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。这三个重点(1)引入了新机制，使高质量语音流与环境传感器数据流在嘈杂的地下环境中运行的传感器节点的低功耗无线网状网络中共存；(2)制定位置查询的节能调度和容错室内定位方案，对井下矿工个体和矿工群体进行定位；(3)基于真实地下矿山的测量数据，利用电磁建模表征了高度复杂和不确定环境下的无线信号行为，以指导矿井隧道中无线节点的优化布置。不仅这些重点作为一个整体是新颖的，而且每个重点发展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在现实世界中迅速部署。研究的广泛影响将把研究成果紧密地整合到各级教学中，包括研究生、本科和K-12教育；扩大女性和少数族裔学生对网络物理研究的参与；并将研究融入现有课程和新课程的教学大纲中。

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.