Development of a Disc Cutter Wear Inspection Robot for a Tunnel Boring Machine

-Protopype Development and Feasibility Test in a Laboratory Environment-

Abstract

The excavation efficiency of Tunnel Boring Machine (TBM) decreases because of the disc cutter (DC) wear. This study develops a DC wear inspection robot for 5m-diameter-class TBMs. The robot has a high expansion ratio actuator to realize an operation in the narrow space of a cutter head. The robot acquires point cloud data of DC surface and estimates the wear amount using ICP matching algorithm. Experiments conducted in this paper examine the accuracy of the proposed method. Experimental results demonstrate that the shape of pre-defined matching model and the measurement angle affect the estimation accuracy and variance.