Drilling Path Planning of Rock-Drilling Jumbo Using a Vehicle-Mounted 3D Scanner

Abstract

Achieving intelligent rock excavation is an important development direction in underground engineering construction. Currently, some rock-drilling jumbos are able to perform autonomous operations under ideal contour surfaces. However, irregular contour surfaces resulting from factors such as rock characteristics, drilling deviation, and blasting effects present a significant challenge for automated drilling under non-ideal surfaces, which constrains the intelligentization of rock excavation. To address this issue, this paper proposes a method for extracting contour surfaces and planning drilling paths based on a vehicle-mounted 3D scanner. This method effectively extracts contour surfaces and optimizes drilling paths, thereby improving work efficiency and safety. Specifically, the proposed method includes: (i) the real-time scanning of cross-sectional contours using a vehicle-mounted 3D scanner to construct an accurate three-dimensional point-cloud model and obtain contour over-digging information; the acquired data are compared with theoretical drilling maps in the vehicle’s coordinate system to re-plan the blasting-hole point set; (ii) the development of a volume-based dynamic search algorithm based on the irregularities of contour surfaces to detect potential collisions between holes; and (iii) the conversion of the drilling sequence planning based on the new blasting hole point set into a traveling salesman problem (TSP), and optimization using a Hybrid Greedy Genetic Algorithm (HGGA) to achieve path traversal of all drilling positions. The effectiveness of the proposed method was verified using rock excavation in a certain mine as an example. The results show that the overall recognition rate of the contour over-digging reached over 80%, the number of arm collisions was significantly reduced, and the distance traveled by the drilling rig was reduced by 35% using the improved genetic algorithm-based rock-drilling rig path planning.

Algorithm for Automatic Rod Feeding and Positioning Error Compensation for Underground Drilling Robots in Coal Mines

“…Conventional underground drilling operations in coal mines heavily rely on manual labor, leading to high safety risks and low productivity [4]. To overcome these limitations, researchers have focused on developing coal mine underground drilling robots [5][6][7]. These intelligent robotic systems can autonomously perform drilling tasks [8], utilizing advancements such as automatic attitude adjustment, autonomous navigation, sensing, and control [9][10][11][12][13][14].…”