The underground intelligent load-haul-dump vehicle (LHD) is a product of the deep integration of traditional LHD with information network technology, automatic controlling and artificial intelligence technology. It gathers the functions of environmental perception, autonomous driving and fault diagnosis in one machine and exhibits higher safety and greater efficiency than traditional LHD. Hence, it is a particularly important piece of underground mining equipment for building green, safe and smart mines. Taking the studies about intelligent LHD collected by CNKI and WOS databases from 1980 to 2022 as a sample data source, employing Citespace visual analysis software for key feature extraction from the documents, statistical analysis was conducted to clarify the current research progress and the frontier topics of the intelligent LHD academia in the past 40 years, in relation to the future development trends. The development history and application status of underground intelligent LHD was expounded in this article, summarizing the research status at home and abroad from four aspects: ore heap perception and modeling technology, trajectory planning method of bucket shoveling, autonomous navigation technology, real-time monitoring and intelligent fault diagnosis technology. The demerits and merits of the technologies were reviewed as well, with future developing and researching trends of the underground intelligent LHD concluded.