Accessibility and Trajectory Planning of Cutter Changing Robot Arm for Large-Diameter Slurry Shield

Aiming at solving the problems of huge cost, long cycle and high risky during manual cutter changing process for shield machine, a cutter changing robot was designed to adapt to its narrow and complex space, the workspace and motion path of cutter changing robot arm were studied. Firstly, by analyzing the internal space and cutter layout characteristic, the configuration of the robot arm was proposed, and the dimension of each rod was designed using multi-objective optimization method. The kinematic model of the robot arm was established by using the D-H model method to analyze its reachable working space. While the inverse kinematic model of the robot arm was solved by the Newton-Raphson iterative method to complete the trajectory planning of the arm for all cutter locations, where the relationship between the target position and the joint variables was established. The motion stability of the robot was verified by virtual simulation and test. The results show that the working space of the designed robot arm meets the cutter changing requirements that all the cutter position can be reached. Moreover, the power output of the drive is smooth, which can transport the cutter weighing up to 250kg.