Amira Global is celebrating its Members, new and old. Today we shine the spotlight on Canary Systems.
Q1. What would you like the Amira community to know about your business?
Canary Systems has provided state-of-the-art data collection and integration systems all over the world for 23+ years to allow clients to extract value from their monitoring investment and better understand and manage geotechnical risks. This includes instrumentation, system architecture, hardware and software, and our web-based data suite, MLWeb.
Q2. What is the problem that, if solved, would make the biggest difference to our industry?
The ability to remove risk is the single greatest problem that we all face in the mining industry, whether it be associated with commodity costs, the stability of a tailings facility, or simply driving around a property. While it is not rational to completely be able to remove all risk, we as an industry can work towards understanding the conditions that affect these risks, and effectively mitigate and reduce them as much as possible through collaborative efforts between operators, suppliers, and research institutions, such as what we’re all doing here through Amira.
Q3. What do you think are the greatest challenges to successful collaboration and how can they be overcome?
Working through the challenges of COVID-19 are likely the greatest obstacles we face at the moment for a successful collaboration, whether it be travelling to gather field samples, meeting face-to-face, or the economic risks during these times. Technology and creativity will be the primary way we overcome these difficulties by coming up with alternative ways to work through everchanging healthcare regulations to still allow the building of relationships between sponsors and providers and the transfer of information that is required for any collaboration to be successful.
Q4. Innovation has its origins in addressing challenges or leveraging R&D – what are your success stories?
Canary Systems as a company has always worked to bridge voids and shortcomings in the geotechnical monitoring industry. As a provider of risk management systems, we have worked day in-and-out with clients’ input to provide products and services that effectively help manage properties more safely.
Recently, on the hardware side of our business, we developed our MLGPS platform for slope stability monitoring that is designed to run in offline mode, not requiring any active network. We also have a new product called MLRemote, which is a low-power distributed logging system with a long-distance radio capable of reading and storing data from most geotechnical sensors.
A couple of years ago, we released the 3D web-based component in our MLWeb platform which allows engineers a revolutionary way to visualize integrated geotechnical data, including radars, point instrumentation, microseismicity, borehole profiles, and nearly all other data types available around a mine. We continue to push the boundary in each of our new software milestone releases, adding tools and components into this 3D platform.
Q5. From whom do you drawn your greatest inspiration?
The canary bird. The small yellow-green bird native to the Canary Islands are known for their near constant melodious song. As an early means of monitoring for gases such as carbon monoxide and methane in coal mines, miners would bring the birds underground. When they stopped singing or collapsed, miners knew it was time to vacate the area.
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