The intelligent construction of coal mines has put forward the requirements of “mechanization of personnel replacement and automation of personnel reduction” for the research and development of coal mining equipment. In order to meet the automation upgrade requirements of directional drilling rigs, the problems of traditional drilling rigs were analyzed in terms of safety, efficiency, and informatization, and the research of drilling rig electro-hydraulic control methods and three automation technologies were focused on. Firstly, a mining explosion-proof electro-hydraulic control system was designed, consisting of a data acquisition and perception unit, a hydraulic control unit, a wireless remote-control unit, and a controller area network (CAN) unit, which enables line of sight remote control of all movements of the drilling rig. Secondly, automatic loading and unloading of drill rods, automatic adjustment of tool orientation angle, and adaptive adjustment of waterway system have been developed. The problem of drill rod grasping and attitude adjustment has been solved through the secondary transportation of dual robotic arms. The precise adjustment and automatic correction of tool orientation angle have been achieved through dual closed-loop control, and the adaptive matching of mud pump water volume and drilling parameters has been achieved based on empirical models. On this basis, the ZYWL-15000DSY high-power automated directional drilling rig was developed and tested in Sihe coal mine, Shanxi Province, with a cumulative drilling depth of over 11 000 m. The application shows that the drilling rig can load 54 drill rods (with a total length of 81 m) at once, meeting the requirements of single shift operations. In automatic mode, the automatic loading and unloading time of a single drill rod is about 90 s. When equipped with an electromagnetic wave wireless measurement system, the directional drilling efficiency along the coal seam can reach 13 m/h. The application of this technology and equipment effectively reduces the labor intensity of workers, improves work safety, and initially achieves the goal of reducing manpower and increasing efficiency.