A Method for Building a Mixed-Reality Digital Twin of a Roadheader Monitoring System

The working environment of the coal mine boom-type roadheader is harsh with large blind areas and numerous safety hazards for operators. Traditional on-site or remote control methods do not meet the requirements for intelligent tunneling. This paper proposes a digital twin monitoring system of an EBZ-type roadheader based on mixed reality (MR). First, the system integrates a five-dimensional digital twin model to establish the boom-type roadheader digital twin monitoring system. Second, the Unity3D software (v2020.3.25f1c1) and the MR Hololens (v22621.1133 produced by Microsoft) are used to build a digital twin human–machine interaction platform, achieving bidirectional mapping and driving of cutting operation data. Third, a twin data exchange program is designed by employing the Winform framework and the C/S communication architecture, making use of the socket communication protocol to transmit and store the cutting model data within the system. Finally, a physical prototype of the boom-type roadheader is built, and a validation experiment of the monitoring system’s digital twin is conducted. The experimental results show that the average transmission error of the cutting model data of the twin monitoring system is below 0.757%, and the execution accuracy error is below 3.7%. This system can achieve bidirectional real-time mapping and control between the twins, which provides a new monitoring method for actual underground roadheader operations. It effectively eliminates the operator’s blind areas and improves the intelligence level of roadheader monitoring. Beyond mining, this methodology can be extended to the monitoring and control of other mining equipment, predictive maintenance in manufacturing, and infrastructure management in smart cities.