The intelligent drilling technology and equipment for coal mine is the advanced technology and equipment that is badly needed by coal enterprises. This paper introduces some milestone achievements in drilling automation made by research institutes and enterprises. However, many key technologies are still unsolved due to the multitude of drilling steps, the complicated drilling process and the changing site conditions, and the intelligent degree, reliability, adaptability and practicability need to be further improved. The adaptability of drilling rig equipment, the complexity of drilling processes and the diversity of demand, explosion-proof and drill pipe make-up and supply are analyzed. It is pointed out that research efforts should be put on navigation and positioning, program control, automatic drilling, automatic loading and unloading of drill pipes, real-time monitoring and transmission of parameters to achieve the goal of practical function, high efficiency and stable performance of intelligent drilling rig. At the same time, it is pointed out that it takes continuous research and development investment and years of time to make intelligent drilling rig commercially available, and that it is proposed to realize intelligent drilling step by step in three stages: automatic drilling stage, intelligent drilling stage and drilling robot.