# Evaluating Swarm Robotics for Mining Environments: Insights into Model Performance and Application
## 5 Results and Discussions
### Mining Scalability and Adaptability  
Scalability and adaptability are essential in mining operations due to varying geological structures and mineral deposit distributions, such as dispersed deposits in placer mines and concentrated deposits in vein mines. This study examines the impact of different environment sizes, namely 5 m by 5 m, 15 m by 15 m (the standard scenario), and 30 m by 30 m on the performance of the considered swarm models. To ensure a fair and consistent comparison, each swarm model was tested with a fixed number of 10 robots. Mining environments can vary greatly in size, from small-scale targeted extractions to large open-pit operations. Therefore, further tests have been conducted for three different environment sizes to evaluate the scalability and adaptability of each swarm model in ore exploration, extraction, and transportation under different mining conditions, and they are illustrated in Figure 11.  
The performance of the swarm models in three different environment sizes (5 m by 5 m, 15 m by 15 m, and 30 m by 30 m) shows that scalability and efficiency are greatly affected by the size of the site and the communication and control mechanisms of each model. The honeybee model takes 214 s to harvest all 20 blocks in a small site of 5 m by 5 m, while for the baseline model it takes 348 s. The hybrid control system of the honeybee model  
Figure 11: Scalability and adaptability of swarm models across varying environment sizes. The boxes are representing the interquartile range (IQR), the solid line inside the box represents the median, the whiskers represent the data range, and the X cross marks the mean (average) value. combines centralized and decentralized functions, which increases its harvesting time by only 10.53% when the environment size increases. The firefly model, which benefits from the beacon system, increases its harvesting time by 22.20%. However, as the environment size increases, the harvesting time of the ant model increases by 60%, and the harvesting time of the baseline model doubles, increasing by 100%, which is mainly due to insufficient coordination and communication. The efficient exploration and targeted harvesting of the honeybee model, where all robots collaborate in a consensus-driven manner, greatly reduces the exploration time, which is the reason for its excellent performance in various environment sizes. By directing nearby robots to ore blocks, the firefly model's beacon system effectively reduces missed detections and meaningless exploration rounds, thus overcoming the challenges posed by larger environments. In contrast, the ant model experiences recovery delays even with shorter travel times because its robots are divided into two groups, which increases the search workload and idle time despite a clear division of labor. Since the baseline model has no communication capabilities, each robot must find and collect ore blocks on its own. This increases the number of missed detections and requires more exploration rounds in larger environments. The firefly and honeybee models exhibit more stable and consistent behavior, making them more suitable for large-scale operations such as the Pilbara iron ore mine, while the ant and baseline models exhibit greater performance variation, indicating that they are more susceptible to environmental randomness and communication interruptions. These results suggest that incorporating the honeybee and firefly models into large-scale mining operations may greatly improve ore-processing efficiency, reduce downtime, and increase the overall productivity. The next study presented in this paper quantitatively assesses the scalability and adaptability of the considered swarm models by evaluating their performance in tasks such as ore exploration, extraction, and transportation under different conditions. These conditions include varying ore blocks levels (from 10 to 30 ore blocks) and different numbers of ore piles (ranging from 1 to 10 piles).