Topography covers the drone and LiDAR survey work that produces the 3D terrain models everything else - blast design, haul-road planning, geological modelling - gets built on top of.
The other half of this small but foundational category is the geological model that terrain and subsurface data are ultimately fused into, which is what the rest of a mine’s planning and design decisions actually reference.
Key Takeaways Baseline topographic survey and 3D terrain modelling are now largely drone/LiDAR-driven, with AI showing up in two distinct places: autonomous SLAM navigation during capture, and implicit-modelling interpolation once the data lands. Emesent …
Key Takeaways Leapfrog Geo (Seequent), Micromine, and Datamine are the established platforms for building the mine geological model. Leapfrog’s implicit modelling engine uses radial basis function (RBF) interpolation — an ML-adjacent mathematical technique — to build 3D geological surfaces …