Roof Supports Measurement in Coal Mining by 3D Registration and Model Fitting

The roof support, a type of special equipment for coal mining, protect miners and other facilities in fully mechanized working face under the ground, and move with shearers when extracting coal. The states of each support, such as the position, height and tilt angle are important for its motion control. Unfortunately, it is difficult to measure these parameters directly in the working face. The novelty of this paper is, we use two LiDARs carried by a rail robot to scan the whole working face for the point cloud and adopt 3D registration and model fitting methods to calculate the key parameters of supports. The experiments show that our method can successfully tackle this problem. Since there are few works that used LiDARs for support measurement, we believe our effort would contribute to the intelligent coal mining.