Coal flow in belt conveyors is often mixed with foreign objects, such as anchor rods, angle irons, wooden bars, gangue, and large coal chunks, leading to belt tearing, blockages at transfer points, or even belt breakage. Fast and effective detection of these foreign objects is vital to ensure belt conveyors’ safe and smooth operation. This paper proposes an improved YOLOv5-based method for rapid and low-parameter detection and recognition of non-coal foreign objects. Firstly, a new dataset containing foreign objects on conveyor belts is established for training and testing. Considering the high-speed operation of belt conveyors and the increased demands for inspection robot data collection frequency and real-time algorithm processing, this study employs a dark channel dehazing method to preprocess the raw data collected by the inspection robot in harsh mining environments, thus enhancing image clarity. Subsequently, improvements are made to the backbone and neck of YOLOv5 to achieve a deep lightweight object detection network that ensures detection speed and accuracy. The experimental results demonstrate that the improved model achieves a detection accuracy of 94.9% on the proposed foreign object dataset. Compared to YOLOv5s, the model parameters, inference time, and computational load are reduced by 43.1%, 54.1%, and 43.6%, respectively, while the detection accuracy is improved by 2.5%. These findings are significant for enhancing the detection speed of foreign object recognition and facilitating its application in edge computing devices, thus ensuring belt conveyors’ safe and efficient operation.

As a crucial element in coal transportation, conveyor belts play a vital role, and monitoring their health is essential for the coal mine transportation system’s safe and efficient operation. This paper introduces a new ‘hardware-friendly’ method for monitoring belt conveyor damage, aiming to address the issue of large parameters and computational requirements in existing deep learning-based foreign object detection methods and their challenges in deploying on edge devices with limited computing power. This method is tailored towards edge computing and aims to reduce the parameters and computational load of foreign object recognition networks deployed on edge computing devices. This method improves the YOLOv8 object detection network and redesigns a novel lightweight ShuffleNetV2 network as the backbone network, making the network more delicate in recognizing foreign object features while reducing redundant parameters. Additionally, a simple parameter-free attention mechanism called SimAM is introduced to further enhance recognition efficiency without imposing additional computational burden. Experimental results demonstrate that the improved foreign object recognition method achieves a detection accuracy of 95.6% with only 1.6 M parameters and 4.7 G model computational load (FLOPs). Compared to the baseline YOLOv8n, the detection accuracy has improved by 3.3 percentage points, while the number of parameters and model computational load have been reduced by 48.4% and 42.0%, respectively. These works are more friendly to edge computing devices that tend to “hardware friendly” algorithms. The improved algorithm can reduce latency in the data transmission process, enabling the accurate and timely detection of non-coal foreign objects on the conveyor belt. This provides assurance for the subsequent host computer system to promptly identify and address foreign objects, thereby ensuring the safety and efficiency of the belt conveyor.

Intelligent gangue sorting with high precision is of vital importance for improving coal quality. To tackle the challenges associated with coal gangue target detection, including algorithm performance imbalance and hardware deployment difficulties, in this paper, an intelligent gangue separation system that adopts the elevated YOLO-v5 algorithm and dual-energy X-rays is proposed. Firstly, images of dual-energy X-ray transmission coal gangue mixture under the actual operation of a coal mine were collected, and datasets for training and validation were self-constructed. Then, in the YOLOv5 backbone network, the EfficientNetv2 was used to replace the original cross stage partial darknet (CSPDarknet) to achieve the lightweight of the backbone network; in the neck, a light path aggregation network (LPAN) was designed based on PAN, and a convolutional block attention module (CBAM) was integrated into the BottleneckCSP of the feature fusion block to raise the feature acquisition capability of the network and maximize the learning effect. Subsequently, to accelerate the rate of convergence, an efficient intersection over union (EIOU) was used instead of the complete intersection over union (CIOU) loss function. Finally, to address the problem of low resolution of small targets leading to missed detection, an L2 detection head was introduced to the head section to improve the multi-scale target detection performance of the algorithm. The experimental results indicate that in comparison with YOLOv5-S, the same version of the algorithm proposed in this paper increases by 19.2% and 32.4% on mAP @.5 and mAP @.5:.95, respectively. The number of parameters decline by 51.5%, and the calculation complexity declines by 14.7%. The algorithm suggested in this article offers new ideas for the design of identification algorithms for coal gangue sorting systems, which is expected to save energy and reduce consumption, reduce labor, improve efficiency, and be more friendly to the embedded platform.

Coal gangue identification is the primary step in coal flow initial screening, which mainly faces problems such as low identification efficiency, complex algorithms, and high hardware requirements. In response to the above, this article proposes a new “hardware friendly” coal gangue image recognition algorithm, RRBM-YOLO, which is combined with dark light enhancement. Specifically, coal gangue image samples were customized in two scenarios: normal lighting and simulated underground lighting with poor lighting conditions. The images were preprocessed using the dim light enhancement algorithm Retinexformer, with YOLOv8 as the backbone network. The lightweight module RepGhost, the repeated weighted bi-directional feature extraction module BiFPN, and the multi-dimensional attention mechanism MCA were integrated, and different datasets were replaced to enhance the adaptability of the model and improve its generalization ability. The findings from the experiment indicate that the precision of the proposed model is as high as 0.988, the mAP@0.5(%) value and mAP@0.5:0.95(%) values increased by 10.49% and 36.62% compared to the original YOLOv8 model, and the inference speed reached 8.1GFLOPS. This indicates that RRBM-YOLO can attain an optimal equilibrium between detection precision and inference velocity, with excellent accuracy, robustness, and industrial application potential.

To address spatial confusion and semantic collapse in maintenance knowledge graph construction for long-distance belt conveyor systems, this study proposes a linear topology-aware alignment framework driven by large language models. The framework constructs a Physical–Space–Fault–Rule ontology and introduces a normalized linear topology mapping mechanism to assign unique spatial anchors to highly homogeneous components. For noisy and colloquial maintenance logs, a Condition–Constraint–Action–Space (CCAS) extraction mechanism is developed to reconstruct implicit fault causal chains and spatial information from unstructured text. To prevent erroneous merging of components with similar semantic descriptions but different physical locations, the LTA-Alignment algorithm integrates Gaussian topological penalties with LLM-based grey-zone arbitration. A structured gold-standard annotation protocol is further established using maintenance logs, BOM records, spatial anchors, and closed-loop repair evidence. Experiments over three predefined runs show that CCAS achieves a global F1-score of 94.10 ± 0.56%, exceeding T5 by 6.20 percentage points. LTA-Alignment achieves a Merge F1-score of 95.75 ± 0.53% and an entity cluster purity of 96.70 ± 0.53%, exceeding SCSA by 3.36 and 3.90 percentage points, respectively. In downstream fault traceability, the dynamic spatiotemporal knowledge graph achieves an Accuracy@1 of 92.78 ± 0.36%, 10.16 percentage points higher than R-GCN, together with an estimated 68.50 ± 0.73% reduction in rule-based simulated troubleshooting time relative to Keyword Retrieval. The results demonstrate that combining normalized spatial topology with LLM reasoning improves entity disambiguation, fault-causal reconstruction, and traceability performance under the evaluated non-branching belt conveyor maintenance setting.