Research on digital twin-driven tracking, positioning and collision detection method of excavating and anchoring equipment

The automation of excavating and anchoring operation is critical for intelligent excavation of coal mine roadway. Aiming at the challenges of relative pose measurement and collision detection during the alternating operation of the current excavating and anchoring equipment, a digital twin-driven tracking, positioning and collision detection method was proposed. Firstly, in order to overcome the influence of low illumination, high dust and complex background interference in the underground excavating face, the multi-point infrared LED target is taken as the information source, the infrared LED feature point image is collected by industrial camera, the center of the spot is extracted using the Hough contour detection and the center of mass method, the ID of the target is identified by binary coding, and the improved sparse optical flow method is adopted to track the spot. Meanwhile, a PNP-based pose solution model of excavating and anchoring equipment is established, and the relative pose of equipment is obtained using a dual quaternion. Secondly, the digital twin technology is utilized to establish the digital twin model of the excavating and anchoring equipment and working face at the actual size based on the Unity3D platform. The real-time data transmission and exchange between the virtual space and the physical entity is realized by Socket communication, the 3D visualization of the real-time pose of the excavating and anchoring equipment in the virtual space is achieved, and the virtual collision detection of the excavating and anchoring equipment is implemented in combination with the oriented bounding box (OBB) collision detection algorithm. Finally, an experimental platform is set up to complete the pose measurement test of the excavating and anchoring equipment, and at the same time, the virtual and real movement trajectories and collision detection effect are verified. The experimental results show that the position and angle errors of the tracking and positioning experiment of the excavating and anchoring equipment are less than 20 mm and 0.30° respectively. In the comparison of virtual and real position coordinates, the maximum error in the X-axis direction does not exceed 1.14 mm, the maximum error in the Y-axis direction does not exceed 1.10 mm, which can ensure the virtual and real consistency and synchronization of the system, meeting the requirements of real-time tracking, positioning and collision detection of the excavating and anchoring equipment during the operation of the excavating face