With the rapid development of science and technology, the development of coal mining in China is stepping into intelligent mining stage from the mechanized automatic mining stage. And the research of intelligent mining is also upgrading to the self-adaptive automation mining from visual remote intervention. In 2019, the first practice of self-adaptive digital mining technology, which is based on transparent longwall theory, was performed in #43101 longwall of Yujialiang coal mine and made notable gains. The 3D laser scanning technology, which played an important role in technology architecture of Yujialiang coal mine’s transparent longwall practice, transformed the mined longwall space information into digital format and then provided reliable basic data for cutting template calculation. This paper introduces application of 3D laser scanning in Yujialiang coal mine in detail, including principle of 3D laser scanning, detection of intersecting curve between longwall’s coal wall and roof, neighbor point-clouds splicing, transformation for longwall pointcloud from local space coordinate system to 3D geological model’s global space coordinate system. The experiment result in #43101 longwall of Yujialiang coal mine demonstrated that 3D laser scanning technology, which is able to quickly and precisely capture mined longwall space information, is a important sensing technology involved by self-adaptive automation mining.