Position measurement technology of boom-type roadheader based on binocular vision

Positioning of underground mining equipment in coal mines is a primary challenge in the intelligent development of tunnel excavation. Accurate and reliable position measurement plays a crucial role in improving excavation efficiency. However, the stability and accuracy of traditional measurement methods are difficult to guarantee due to factors such as vibration, magnetic interference, and the absence of GPS signals in coal mine environments. To address the problem of unstable measurement of the boom-type roadheader's position, this paper proposes a binocular vision-based measurement technique that utilizes four light spots as characteristic points. By processing the target images captured by the binocular camera and combining the minimum bounding rectangle and ellipse fitting of the spot regions, the method successfully obtains the four light spot characteristics. Subsequently, precise matching and stereo distance measurement of the target in the left and right images enable the determination of the boom-type roadheader's posi-tion information. A positioning platform based on binocular vision is built and experimentally evaluated. The results demonstrate that this method can achieve accurate spot extraction and stable measurement of the machine's position, even in complex backgrounds such as mixed lighting and low illumination. The planar measurement errors within a distance range of 50 m are all within +/- 25 mm, which basically meets the required construction precision for tunnel excavation.