Abstract: In order to solve the safety problems faced by the exploration of the old roadway and room and pillar mined zone of the coal mine, combined with explosion-proof technology and robot technology, a coal mine roadway exploration robot is researched and designed. The design scheme of the robot is described. The robot system mainly includes the robot body, wireless relay and handheld remote control terminal. The system composition and working principle of each part are introduced in detail. The software system design flow and implementation method of the robot are further described, including the flow design of the main control program, the information collection and display alarm program, and the flow design of the data transmission and communication program. The road-exploring robot developed successfully is applied in the field. The experiment and application results show that the robot has good adaptability, high efficiency, safety and high efficiency, and can replace the manual exploration of old tunnel, which is the development direction of mine old tunnel exploration.