摘要 |
The present apparatus makes use of a novel mineral identification system to not only identify the desired minerals and estimate a percent of mineralization, but also locate their presence on the mining face in an x, y coordinate manner in order to guide the mining operation of the associated robot mining apparatus. This is accomplished through the use of a camera and video monitor system which picks up the light returned from the mining face as illuminated by the light source. Therefore, on a pixel by pixel basis the camera identifies the light intensity returned from the mining face. In order to obtain the unique light signature of the desired minerals, a plurality of narrow band light filters is used to screen the light reflected from the mining face prior to its being focussed on the video camera. Thus, a three dimensional matrix is formed, consisting of data entries for each pixel of the video image for each frequency of interest as determined by the filter used to filter the returned light prior to its focussing onto the video camera.
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