Structural Design of a TBM Foldable Disc Cutter Changing Robot

Aiming at the problems of low efficiency, high danger and high cost of manual disc cutter changing during the construction of shield structure method, an automated disc cutter changing program based on robot operation is proposed. Firstly, by analyzing the operating environment and functional requirements of the disc cutter changing robot, a new 8-degrees-of-freedom foldable disc cutter changing robot structure is designed. Then, based on the ANSYS Workbench simulation platform, static calculation and simulation are performed to verify that the strength and stiffness of the whole structure of the robot meet the design requirements; finally, the kinematic modeling of the robot is performed by the D-H method, and the workspace calculations are performed by the Monte Carlo pseudo-random method. The results show that the disc cutter changer robot can meet the functional requirements, motion requirements and rigidity requirements for changing the hob under the premise of adapting to the narrow space inside the TBM, and can realize the replacement of 90.2% of the disc cutter of the whole machine.