High-performance adaptive robust control with balanced torque allocation for the over-actuated cutter-head driving system in tunnel boring machine

The tunnel boring machine(TBM) is a kind of large-scale underground equipment for the tunnel and subway excavations. The cutter-head driving system is one of the key components in hard rock TBM, which is driven by multiple motors to provide enough torque during the excavation. Synchronizing motions of the multiple driving motors and balancing the driving torques are two essential control issues to be addressed of cutter-head driving system. However, the existing synchronization control approaches usually focus on the pure motion synchronization of the multiple driving motors only. These methods will lead to the phenomena of uneven driving torques even when their motions are quite well synchronized, and may result in the shaft broken accident. Instead in this paper, an adaptive robust control law integrated with torque allocation technique scheme is proposed that achieves not only better motion synchronization of the driving motors but also simultaneous regulation of driving torques. Namely, the adaptive robust control (ARC) is introduced to deal with the negative effects from uncertainties and variable load acting on the cutter-head. And a torque allocation algorithm is proposed to distribute the driving torque of each motor evenly. Comparative simulations are carried out to verify the excellent performance of the proposed scheme.