Patent ID: 7392151

Claim:
A method of initializing the position and direction of a mining vehicle when starting to drive the vehicle in the mine, the mining vehicle comprising a movable carrier and a control system, and wherein the control system is arranged to read an electronic environmental model including data on coordinates of an environment delimiting a route; and a preplanned route including at least the coordinates of route points of the route to be driven, the method comprising: scanning the environment of the mining vehicle and determining scanned points on the basis of obstacles detected by the scanning; determining a search range including at least part of the route points of the preplanned route of the mining vehicle; selecting each route point within the search range at a time as the position of the mining vehicle; calculating coordinates for the scanned points of the scanning by using each route point within the search range and at least one direction; comparing the calculated coordinates of the scanned points with the coordinates of the points in the environmental model; and selecting such a route point and direction as the initial values of the vehicle, by which the calculated coordinates of the scanned points best match the coordinates of the points in the environmental model, and the position of the selected route point and the selected direction are used as the initial values when starting to drive the vehicle in the mine.