PRESS RELEASE: Last year, Hexagon Mining began discussing a renewed and expanded partnership with CSM. CSM’s Priscilla Nelson, department head of mining, and James Abbott, director of corporate and foundation relations, contacted Hexagon to pursue a deeper relationship. President Hélio Samora asked applications engineer John Lyons-Baral to coordinate an emerging educational programme for Hexagon Mining.

They researched Hexagon Mining’s and Hexagon AB’s existing and legacy university relationships and discovered many models of university relationships among its legacy brands, MineSight, SAFEmine and Leica Geosystems Mining, as well as Intergraph and Hexagon Geospatial.

Drawing on Samora’s previous experience with university programmes through his former company PTC, they devised a pilot programme for trial at CSM. Last October, Samora and Lyons-Baral spent two days at CSM in Golden, Colorado, US. The visit featured meetings and a tour of the Edgar Experimental Underground Mine.

They discussed Hexagon Mining’s vision for universities with the university president, Paul Johnson, foundation president, Brian Winkelbauer, and college deans and department heads. The discussions covered scholarships, software and hardware donations, research collaboration, design and hackathon competitions, and a master collaboration agreement. They also discussed a student version of MineSight, limited to mining fundamentals and maintained on student computers.

Later in the year, Hexagon Mining’s representatives visited CSM again, and Paul Johnson and Brian Winkelbauer visited the company in Tucson. With Karen Paul, Hexagon corporate counsel, they began work on an official master collaboration agreement with the university.

This agreement establishes a framework for them to easily approach each other and develop projects under the contract. Such projects include using the Edgar Mine for testing Hexagon Mining technology, and sharing underground technology with students and faculty; a new scholarship agreement for students expanded to include those outside of mining; potential research collaboration with faculty; and laser scanning of the Edgar Mine.

Senior MineSight specialist, Alyson Cartwright, met with CSM faculty to evaluate potential improvements to MineSight. She discovered that Hexagon had already improved many previously requested areas of software usability with more improvements coming soon.

Director of product development, Erik Johnson, met faculty in many departments from mining to computer science, looking for any confluences of CSM research and the company’s technological roadmap. Laser scanning provided a digital model of the Edgar Mine for CSM’s faculty and students to use in MineSight and for research. The Edgar Mine was scoped for implementation of Hexagon’s UG Fleet Management System.

James Abbott, Karen Paul and John Lyons-Baral pushed the master partnership agreement through the proper channels to achieve an officially signed contract.

The first project was the laser scanning of the Edgar Mine with the Leica P40 laser scanner. Greg Dolphin, Leica HDS scanning consultant, conducted the scanning with the help of Matt Schreiner, Edgar mine manager, and Lyons-Baral. The students are now using this data in their MineSight training.