NIOSH Robotics and Intelligent Mining Technology and Workplace Safety Research (U60)

Purpose
This NOFO supports applied research to advance automation, robotics, and intelligent mining systems that improve safety and health in U.S. mining operations. Projects should deliver field-ready solutions that strengthen communication, self-escape, refuge performance, and overall safety through modern autonomy, sensing, and decision-support technologies.
Background
Mining remains hazardous. In 2025, MSHA recorded 33 fatalities, including powered-haulage and machinery incidents. Early 2026 data show continued roof and rib failures and pressure-vessel events. Although the 2025 injury rate reached a historic low, gaps persist in emergency communication reliability, low-visibility self-escape, and refuge performance. Advances in robotics and intelligent systems offer potential for rapid assessment, resilient communications, and improved decision-making.
Approach
The Miner Health Program, 2020–2030 Strategic Agenda provides a long term framework for improving miner health and well being through integrated research, evaluation, and community engagement.
This cooperative agreement aligns with that agenda by supporting research in robotics and intelligent mining to reduce hazardous exposures, strengthen emergency response, and improve miner safety and health.
Objectives
Objectives support research in automation, robotics, and intelligent systems that enhance mining safety and health. Projects should advance "assured autonomy," ensuring autonomous equipment improves worker safety while maintaining productivity.
Potential impacts include:

• Advances and implementation of human-centered design principles for automated equipment and related systems.

• New methods, guidance, and best practices in change management, training/retraining, technology integration, and safety evaluation.

• New methods and evaluation techniques for safe design considering the full mining operation.

• Advances and availability of enabling technologies for assured autonomy, including sensors, data fusion, AI, and systems improving machine and operator situational awareness.

• Availability of new miner-rescue and post-disaster surveillance technologies.
Applicants are encouraged to leverage mining and explosives-engineering graduate program facilities. Proposals must clearly state goals, link them to documented burdens, and provide concise evidence on exposures, populations at risk, and expected impact. Include supporting data such as morbidity or mortality rates and indicators of population risk.
Eligibility
Congress intends for the award to go to a U.S. academic institution that (1) offers an ABET-accredited undergraduate program in mining or mineral engineering (under the Mining and Similarly Named Engineering Programs criteria) and (2) offers graduate programs in both mining engineering and explosives engineering.