Abstract: With the continuous adjustment and optimization of China's energy structure, coal mining is accelerating to the intelligent direction, however, affected by the complexity of the geological environment and other external factors, the coal rock interface identification in the actual mining process still mainly rely on manual judgment, there are low identification efficiency, large errors, safety risks and other problems. In order to realize the unmanned and intelligent coal mining, this paper discusses the application of ground-penetrating radar technology to coal-rock interface recognition, the study firstly adopts the time-domain finite difference method to carry out theoretical analysis, and then carries out systematic forward simulation experiments around the interface morphology, the distribution of gangue, the gas-containing and water-containing fissures and other key variables affecting the recognition effect of the coal-rock. The results indicate that when the coal-rock interface is horizontal or inclined, ground-penetrating radar signals exhibit pronounced reflection characteristics; the increase in the number of gangue layers will lead to mutual interference between multiple reflection signals, which causes the signal interpretation error to expand; in the presence of water-containing or gas-containing fissures under the working conditions, the ground-penetrating radar are able to realize the effective identification of the coal-rock position, but under the conditions of water-containing, the coal-rock interface reflective signal strength is significantly reduced, difficult to read directly, and need to be read by the water-containing fissures. However, under watery conditions, the reflected signal strength of the coal-rock interface is significantly weakened, which is difficult to be read directly, and the location of the coal-rock interface has to be determined by analyzing the image. The simulation results of this study can provide theoretical support and technical guidance for the identification of coal-rock interface, which is of great significance for promoting the development of intelligent coal mining technology.