Abstract: In order to meet the requirements of operation of tunnel drilling rig in the soft coal seam, a drilling parameter measuring system was designed. The hardware and software were designed separately. Hardware with the automotive programmable logic controller(PLC) as control core and with controller area net(CAN) bus as communication network was focused in the design especially for the requirements of usage in coal mine. Driver software was designed with CoDeSys development tool and PC software interface was developed based on LabVIEW. Practical application results show that the measurement system can accurately obtain drilling parameters required for operation of tunnel drilling rig in the soft coal seam, and has advantages such as strong real-time performance, accuracy and high reliability, friendly man-machine interaction, etc.