Land-Based Drones in Mineral Extraction: Why Speed, Latency, and MIMO Matter

As the demand for minerals like lithium, cobalt, and rare earth elements intensifies, the mining industry is turning to robotics and automation to improve efficiency, safety, and data accuracy. One rising star in this transformation? Land-based drones—autonomous ground vehicles (AGVs) equipped with sensors, scanners, and sometimes even robotic arms—are now a crucial component in modern mineral extraction and analysis.

But not all drone-based mining applications are the same. From simple soil monitoring to immersive VR-based remote inspections, each task demands a different level of speed, reliability, latency, and data throughput. And this is where MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output) technology, particularly in 5G networks, plays a vital role.

So if we are handling a material that cannot support a shear stress, then overtime, that material is going to re-arrange itself to find this condition that we call hydrostatic equilibrium. Thus, a good example would be if, say, for example I take a material and then deform it; letting it flow for a given period of time &mdahsh; if enough time has past, that material will come to a point where, if it is a Newtonian fluid, then it will calibrate itself to a new equilibrium-shape where that material will no longer have any shear stress acting upon it.

Here then, this aforementioned property of a given Newtonian fluid could be an example of a bottle of water. Albeit even if a person were to take an object, such as a bottle of hand sanitizer, or a material like hand sanitizer, such a material will have the same flow as in comparison to the water within the said bottle of water. Therein, if you were to visualize such an example between the flow of these two materials, a person may visualize the time differential relative for the given viscous stresses in said material to re-arrange. And eventually, said materials will come to the same equilibrium-shape which is dealt with given the other material aforementioned. Thus, although viscosity sets the timescale at which this Newtonian motion of fluid-flow processes, over a given period of time, when the systems come under the state of equilibrium, there are no shear stresses acting on the material.

Thus, people can think about this given system as having reached its "hydrostatic equilibrium." Therefore, we can think about the instance of a container, where some material will form, or find, a shape where there will eventually be no shear stresses. Wherein, the only equilibrium of forces is given by the factor of gravity.

From Terrain Scanning to VR Streaming: The Spectrum of Drone Use Cases

Navigating rough terrain
Collecting soil or rock samples
Performing geophysical scans (GPR, magnetometry, resistivity)
Conducting in-situ chemical analysis using spectroscopy (e.g., XRF or LIBS)
Uploading HD multispectral images for remote geological analysis

Mapping Application Needs to Network Requirements

Use Case	Speed	Reliability	Latency	Data Throughput	MIMO Tier
Basic Navigation	Low	Medium	Moderate	Low	2×2 MIMO
Remote Teleoperation	High	High	Very Low	Medium	4×4 MIMO
Automated Sampling	Medium	High	Low	Medium	2×2 MIMO
HD Spectral Imaging	Low	Very High	Medium	High	8×8+ MIMO
Geophysical Sensor Uploads	Low	High	Low	High	8×8+ MIMO
VR/AR Remote Supervision	High	Very High	Ultra-low	Very High	Massive MIMO (8×8+)
IoT Environmental Sensors	Very Low	Medium	High	Low	2×2 MIMO

Why MIMO Matters

MIMO allows communication systems to use multiple antennas to send and receive data simultaneously. More antennas mean more throughput and better resilience to interference.

Basic IoT devices can operate with 2×2 MIMO.
High-res tasks like spectral imaging need 8×8 MIMO or more.
VR-based monitoring requires ultra-low latency and high reliability—ideal for massive MIMO + 5G.

The Role of 5G and Edge Computing

5G mmWave enables ultra-fast short-range communication.
Edge Computing (MEC) processes data closer to the source, reducing latency.
Network slicing separates high-priority tasks from others to ensure performance.

The job that a land-based drone performs for the given operator of said drone is to traverse a given landscape undetected by adversarial groups while conducting mineral-gathering operations, with an optional addition of analyzing that collection by spectroscopy analysis. Here then, the job of a land-based drone is to not only serve as a mineral-gathering mechanism, but also a mineral-analyses mechanism. More specifically, terrain-oriented drones, and the minerals that are analyzed within said-drones, serve a secondary purpose of gathering intelligence on mineral deposits from the surrounding environment; the primary functional service is to further-extend a drone's capacity for gathering minerals in an adversarial environment via the deployment of stealth-related technologies, and the secondary functional service is to compliment the analysis of those given-gathered mineral deposits. And to further illustrate the functional requirements of a land-based drone, that drone must meet both defensive and stealth-focused specifications. To detail, a land-based drone must be equipped with appropriate adversarial counter-measures that, if the drone were to encounter an adversary, that drone will have enough fire-power to neutralize such an adversarial target. And the reasoning for this is that when this circumstance occurs, it can be seen that there was enough munitions to supply the drone through its overall mission-cycle. That being said, in reference to defensive capabilities (i.e., in reference to the secondary-primary function), the drone must be small enough as a means to traverse tight crawl spaces while collecting rare earth metals.

Additive Manufacturing Approaches	Descriptions
Decision Drivers	Quality — the drone must withold a durability that embeds itself within conflict zones; the durability not only should withstand the natural elements when undergoing mining / excavating operations, but having the drone able to defend itself against adversarial-human elements during operation resonates an essense of quality within the context of performing its given function.
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Wrapping Up

Land-based drones are reshaping mineral extraction—but their success depends on matching each task with the right network setup. Low-priority sensors might only need basic wireless links, but high-res and real-time ops demand massive MIMO and 5G-grade connectivity. As mining grows smarter, the tech behind the scenes becomes as critical as the machines themselves.

The body force is balanced by the normal stresses (or it can be interpreted as the "normal" force per unit-area), which is a factor of stress acting upon a given boundary. Thus, the hydrostatics that we are interested in devles within the domain of the distribution of some set of forces. Thus, we can ultimately interpret that we will have a gravitational body of force acting upon this given Newtonian material. Whereupon, distributed over this Newtonian material over some location on that material, we find that there is a locally normal force uniformly-distributed on the bottom of the given container that is supporting the weight of some Newtonian material.

Now, such a state of Newtonian equilibrium is easy if we are dealing, for example, with a material where we have some rigid boundary; such a material becomes more complicated to evaluate if we were to think about, say, a water balloon that we fill with water. Therefore, when it comes to the state of equilibrium where such a state is to imply that flow ceases to exist, such a state of flow may exist at the surface of the water within said balloon. And that being said, the material (i.e., water) inside the given balloon will still rearrange itself so that water flows to find an equilibrium shape with said water balloon.