Abstract: The navigation and positioning accuracy of the excavation face is directly related to the roadway forming quality and tunneling safety, serving as a key foundation for realizing intelligent rapid tunneling and robotized tunneling in coal mines. In view of the working conditions of coal mine roadways characterized by long duration, short distance, low speed, strong disturbance, high dust concentration and weak illumination, this paper systematically sorts out the navigation and positioning requirements and technical difficulties of typical excavation equipment, and reviews the development status of sensor positioning methods such as inertial navigation, odometer-assisted inertial navigation, vision, laser, ultra-wideband and total station, as well as multi-sensor integrated positioning technology. A geodetic coordinate-based integrated positioning technology for the excavation face is proposed, which integrates a mine intrinsically safe gyro total station, inertial navigation system and displacement sensors built in the hydraulic cylinders of the roadheader, forming a geodetic coordinate-based integrated positioning system for the excavation face. This system can measure the position and attitude information of the cantilever roadheader at the excavation face in real time, especially the three-dimensional geodetic coordinates of the cutting head,and analyze the propagation law of positioning errors. The test results show that the root mean square error of the three-dimensional point position of the fuselage prism of the navigation and positioning system based on geodetic coordinates is 4.86 cm under the walking trajectory of the linear and curved roadheader, which meets the requirements of automatic cutting positioning accuracy.