In coal mines, accurate positioning is vital for roadheader equipment. However, most roadheaders use a standalone strapdown inertial navigation system (SINS) which faces challenges like error accumulation, drift, initial alignment needs, temperature sensitivity, and the demand for high-quality sensors. In this paper, a roadheader Visual–Inertial Odometry (VIO) system is proposed, combining SINS and stereo visual odometry to adjust to coal mine environments. Given the inherently dimly lit conditions of coal mines, our system includes an image-enhancement module to preprocess images, aiding in feature matching for stereo visual odometry. Additionally, a Kalman filter merges the positional data from SINS and stereo visual odometry. When tested against three other methods on the KITTI and EuRoC datasets, our approach showed notable precision on the EBZ160M-2 Roadheader, with attitude errors less than 0.2751° and position discrepancies within 0.0328 m, proving its advantages over SINS.

In response to the challenges posed by complex and variable operating conditions of rolling bearings and the limited availability of labeled data, both of which hinder the effective extraction of key fault features and reduce diagnostic accuracy, this study introduces a model that combines a spatial attention (SA) mechanism with a multi-scale depthwise separable convolution module. The proposed approach first employs the Gramian angular difference field (GADF) to convert raw signals. This conversion maps the temporal characteristics of the signal into an image format that intrinsically preserves both temporal dynamics and phase relationships. Subsequently, the model architecture incorporates a spatial attention mechanism and a multi-scale depthwise separable convolutional module. Guided by the attention mechanism to concentrate on discriminative feature regions and to suppress noise, the convolutional component efficiently extracts hierarchical features in parallel through the multi-scale receptive fields. Furthermore, the trained model serves as a pre-trained network and is transferred to novel variable-condition environments to enhance diagnostic accuracy in few-shot scenarios. The effectiveness of the proposed model was evaluated using bearing datasets and field-collected industrial data. Experimental results confirm that the proposed model offers outstanding fault recognition performance and generalization capability across diverse working conditions, small-sample scenarios, and real industrial environments.

To address the low accuracy of current one-dimensional signal recognition for coal-rock cutting vibration and the low efficiency of traditional static neural networks, this paper proposes an interpretable recognition method that combines Markov transition field (MTF) and channel-selective neural networks. Firstly, by decomposing and reconstructing the energy of wavelet packets and denoising the signal, it is transformed into MTF images with temporal correlation to improve signal processing efficiency. Then, a channel selective module is proposed to replace traditional convolutional layers, enhancing the model’s ability to extract data features. A spatial shift mechanism is improved to alleviate the problem of weight degradation and improve the model’s generalization capability. Experimental results on the self-built dataset show that MTF can effectively capture the dynamic characteristics of time series data compared to other signal transformation methods. ResNet + SelectConv achieved recognition accuracy of 97.375% without adding extra parameters and maintained good robustness in noise environments up to 6 dB, significantly outperforming traditional methods. This study improves the efficiency and accuracy of coal-rock cutting state recognition and provides new insights for signal processing in environments with limited underground computational resources.

Rolling bearings are a key component for ensuring the safe and smooth operation of rotating machinery and are very prone to failure. Therefore, intelligent fault diagnosis research on rolling bearings has become a crucial task in the field of mechanical fault diagnosis. This paper proposes research on the fault diagnosis of rolling bearings based on an adaptive nearest neighbor strategy and the discriminative fusion of multi-feature information using supervised manifold learning (AN-MFIDFS-Isomap). Firstly, an adaptive nearest neighbor strategy is proposed using the Euclidean distance and cosine similarity to optimize the selection of neighboring points. Secondly, three feature space transformation and feature information extraction methods are proposed, among which an innovative exponential linear kernel function is introduced to provide new feature information descriptions for the data, enhancing feature sensitivity. Finally, under the adaptive nearest neighbor strategy, a novel AN-MFIDFS-Isomap algorithm is proposed for rolling bearing fault diagnosis by fusing various feature information and classifiers through discriminative fusion with label information. The proposed AN-MFIDFS-Isomap algorithm is validated on the CWRU open dataset and our experimental dataset. The experiments show that the proposed method outperforms other traditional manifold learning methods in terms of data clustering and fault diagnosis.

High geothermal hazard is a basic problem that must be solved in deep mining; thereby the research on thermal insulation supporting for high temperature control of deep roadway is increasing. However, the quantitative analysis of its thermal insulation effect is yet to be carried out. By building the physical model and control equations of the thermal insulation supporting roadway and considering heat‐humidity transfer at wall, the temperature field distribution of surrounding rock and airflow is numerically calculated. Based on numerical simulation results, the evolution law of temperature with ventilation time is analyzed at airflow inlet, outlet, and different sections, then the variation law of surface heat transfer coefficient with position and time is obtained. For heat insulation support structure, the results show that it is not obvious to change the distribution law of temperature field, but it is effective to weaken the convection heat transfer between surrounding rock and airflow. In the main airflow area, the rate of heat exchange gradually decreases with the heat exchange becoming more and more sufficient; in boundary layer, the airflow temperature quickly transits from the wall temperature to that of the main airflow area because of intense collisions of airflow masses, so the mechanism of temperature change is different. The surface heat transfer coefficient well reflected the unstable heat‐humidity transfer, especially in the beginning of ventilation or at airflow inlet. Therefore, the heat insulation supporting structure is helpful to the auxiliary cooling of high temperature mine.

Fault diagnosis of belt conveyors is crucial for coal mine production, but audio-based fault diagnosis in underground coal mines remains challenging due to the strong noise environment. To address this problem, a method for audio fault diagnosis of belt conveyors based on improved variational modal decomposition and improved adaptive noise reduction convolutional networks (IANCNs) in strong noise environments is proposed. Firstly, the improved beluga whale optimization is designed by introducing the non-linear balance factor and non-linear probability and combining them with the proposed cyclical shock factor to optimize the variational modal decomposition parameters to achieve noise reduction and signal reconstruction. Secondly, an IANCN is developed using an adaptive threshold activation function and an improved loss function to enhance noise robustness and fault diagnosis accuracy. Finally, the proposed method’s effectiveness is evaluated in low and strong noise environments, with experimental results demonstrating superior fault diagnosis performance. In low noise environments, the fault diagnosis accuracy is 98.61%, and in strong noise environments, it is 98.96%, outperforming existing fault diagnosis methods.