New insights on ground control in intelligent mining with Internet of Things

Abstract The conception of Smart city has been gaining momentum in recent years. Coal mines as a part of city should be characterized with smart or intelligent features. Production and safety are two major themes in coal mining. With the development of automation, Internet of Things (IoT), big data, artificial intelligence, and cloud computing in Fourth Industrial Revolution, Intelligence Mining has been put forward by Chinese Academy of Engineering to achieve the goal of unmanned workface production. However, safety is not highlighted in the novel idea. In this paper, ground control in intelligent mining with IoT is studied. An architecture of ground control with IoT is proposed. The previous research on theoretical modelling and on-site monitoring methods are reviewed. Then the IoT based ground control method is proposed. An on-going dynamic platform on ground control are proposed based on our research of nondestructive testing (NDT) on rock bolt anchorage quality assessment. The research progress is introduced with equipment introduction, principles, and an on-site experiment. Future developments on combination of NDT and IoT of ground control is discussed. The ideas, frameworks, and results in this paper can make efforts on safety control and spark new ideas in the much-anticipated Intelligence Mining.