Towards Spatial Perception for Heterogeneous Robot Collaboration in Subterranean Mining Environments
In this preprint, the authors build an onboard perception pipeline that lets a lightweight Explorer robot find minerals in underground mines from free-text prompts and hand compact, oriented 3D inspection targets to a heavier Inspector robot. Field tests in a test mine and an active magnesite mine detected two mineral types without retraining and condensed about 38,000 raw mineral points into a few dozen polygons, roughly two orders of magnitude smaller. This matters because autonomous mining inspection requires no mine-specific labels and low-bandwidth robot-to-robot handover.