Development of a novel muck removal hydraulic manipulator for automated steel arch assembly of tunnel boring machine

The muck-removal at the bottom of the tunnel is a major constraint on the construction progress and advance rate. Removing the muck in a timely and effective manner is a prerequisite for the automated steel arch assembly. To solve this problem, a muck removal hydraulic manipulator with high-performance position tracking control is developed to handle with randomly scattered rock piles, slag and muck under the bottom of tunnel, so as to facilitate automated steel arch assembly. Firstly, an informative and compact description of the equation of screw swing cylinder actuated system is established by using ameliorated Lagrangian dynamic formulation and state space representation. Secondly, the cubic spline interpolation optimized by an improved genetic algorithm is carried out for the trajectory planning under the kinematic and dynamic constraints of the manipulator. Thirdly, a linearized feed-forward compensation approach and a parameter estimation based robust adaptive algorithm is proposed for position tracking control. In addition, the system stability is proved in the sense of Lyapunov stability theorem. The proposed controller performance is validated by comparative simulation analysis and experimental investigations. It turns out the proposed manipulator with trajectory planner and high precision tracking controller has great potential to help increase the efficiency of the slag and muck removal operation, so as to improve the automation level of the steel arch assembly.