Nonlinear adaptive control of EPB shield tunneling machine

This paper solves the issue of earth pressure balance (EPB) control in shield tunneling. Keeping earth pressure balanced on cutting head is the key to ground deformation avoidance. However, only a few control methods based on mechanism model are put forward and all the model applied before seldom involved nonlinearity and uncertainty. Thus, a nonlinear model of EPB control in shield tunneling is first established with consideration of particular parametric and multi-unmodeled uncertainties in order to match the actual system more precisely, and a nonlinear adaptive control method is proposed for a class of uncertain nonlinear systems in this paper. The resulting controller guarantees the shield machine system to be globally uniformly ultimately bounded with a satisfactory transient performance and a small steady tracking error as expected to some extent.