Adaptive Robust Coordinated Control for Over-actuated Cutter-head Driving Systems of Hard Rock Tunnel Boring Machines

The cutter-head system of tunnel boring machines (TBM) is one of the key components for rock cutting and excavation. In this paper, the coordinated control problem is investigated for the over-actuated cutter-head driving system of TBM. A generalized nonlinear time-varying dynamic model is developed for the hard rock TBM cutter-head driving system. An adaptive robust control law integrated with control allocation technique is proposed, which controls the cutter-head to desired velocities while driving torques are well coordinated. Specially, the adaptive robust control (ARC) is used to deal with the negative effects of various uncertainties and variable loads acting on the cutter-head, and a coordinated control scheme with appropriate control allocation is developed to distribute the driving torque of each motor evenly. Comparative simulations are carried out to verify the excellent performance of the proposed scheme. The results suggest that, with the proposed control scheme, the motion performance is guaranteed and the driving torques are also well coordinated, validating the effectiveness and the performance improvement of the proposed control strategy.