IJCAS

At present, the splicing of steel arches for open-type TBM suffers from the problems of labor-intensive, time-consuming, low efficiency and greater potencial risk to workers. Rock-fall and collapse caused by untimely support is still one of the main construction accidents. In this paper, a novel steel arch splicing manipulator is developed for unmanned and automated steel arch splicing, and a backstepping method based cascade control strategy is proposed to improve the trajectory tracking control performance. Firstly, the inner-loop controller is designed to compensate the flow coupling between each joint-driven hydraulic cylinder based on dynamic analysis and feedback linearization. Secondly, the adaptive robust controller is adopted for outer-loop controller design to deal with parametric uncertainties and external disturbances. Finally, the system stability is proved by Lyapunov function, then comparative experiments are conducted to verify the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed control scheme. It can be concluded that the proposed controller has a better trajectory tracking control performance, while the control input is much smoother than that of traditional PID controller.

Keywords: Adaptive robust control, backstepping, steel arch splicing manipulator, TBM, trajectory tracking.