Sandvik turned an ordinary rock bolt into an underground mine sensor

Two new Sandvik systems turn ground support bolts into connected sensors, giving underground mines continuous data on ground behavior — at no extra hardware cost.

Sandvik unveiled two new products in its xCell line — Banshee and Hydra — aimed at digital ground support monitoring in underground mines. The launch took place at the ACG Caving Conference 2026 in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, a reference event for block caving and other large-scale underground mining techniques.

Ground support is one of the least visible — and most critical — parts of underground mine engineering. Rock bolts hold up the roof and walls of excavated drifts, but until now the only practical way to know whether a bolt was still doing its job was periodic visual inspection, a method that misses slow deformation and accumulated fatigue. xCell Banshee attacks that blind spot by digitizing Sandvik's own MD and MDX bolts: each unit gets a unique identifier and allows in-service testing and condition assessment without changing the standard installation process — and at no extra hardware cost, since the company plans to make this instrumented version the standard production model. xCell Hydra goes further: it uses bolts with embedded sensors and a battery-powered data logger capable of connecting up to nine bolts, collecting deformation profiles at multiple measurement points over time. Reading that data happens through 'drive-by' technology — a vehicle passes near the installation at up to 30 km/h and collects the information without stopping the operation. Both systems feed Sandvik's Digital Ground Support Platform, a cloud environment that consolidates data, analytics and asset-integrity documentation. In practice, this shifts ground support from a reactive logic — replacing or reinforcing after a problem appears — to a predictive logic, based on load and deformation trends captured continuously.

Mines are getting deeper and geotechnical conditions more complex — which makes rock mass behavior less predictable using traditional inspection methods. A system that turns the support structure itself into a data source closes the gap between point-in-time inspections and the ground's actual behavior between one survey and the next. That has a direct effect on operational safety and cost: catching a bolt's loss of capacity before it becomes a structural problem reduces the need for corrective rehabilitation, which tends to be more expensive and more disruptive than planned maintenance. For geotechnical engineers, the case also illustrates a broader trend — that digitalization in underground mining doesn't necessarily mean adding new, expensive hardware, but instrumenting components that already exist in the operating cycle.