Abstract:Nowadays there are more and more urban underground space development projects which are close to metro tunnel and highway tunnel. It is necessary carry out the real-time automatic monitoring for the existing tunnels. The total station is a kind of 3D measuring equipment with high efficiency and accuracy, which can be easily used as the automatic monitoring system in narrow and long tunnel. The automatic tunnel monitoring technology based on total station is mainly introduced. The precision and reliability to monitor the settlement, convergence and horizontal displacement of tunnel are discussed. According to the multi-engineering examples, it has good applicability to establish the automatic monitoring system with high precision total station, which has the high monitoring precision for the tunnel, and can meet the real-time monitoring need.