Digital Twin System for Robotic Tool-replacing in Tunnel Boring Machine

Tunnel boring machine (TBM) tool-replacing robot play an important role in improving the efficiency and safety of tunnel construction. However, considering the complexity and specificity of the working environment, current robotic tool-replacing solutions still have deficiencies, including the lack of customized motion simulation tools, the difficulty of human-robot interaction due to confined space, and the lack of management of robot operation data. To address these issues, this paper designs a digital twin system for robotic tool-replacing in TBM. The system builds a virtual working environment using Unity3D, and establishes a kinematic model of the robot to achieve the pre-planning of the movement trajectory. The synchronous mapping between the digital model of the robot and the physical entity is achieved through Socket communication technology, thus realizing the digital monitoring of the tool-replacing process. In addition, twin databases of the system are built based on SQLite for storing and managing the robot's operation data. Finally, the effectiveness of each functional module of the system is proved through experiments.