Abstract: During the operating of tunnel boring machine, the unbalanced force of each motor in cutterhead drive system would cause component damage or even system malfunction. Hence, the structure and control mode of the cutterhead drive system are analyzed, the motor vector control model is established, and an improved coupling control structure is proposed for cutterhead drive system. The motorgiven speed selection function is equipped on the structure to eliminate the synchronous error caused by the delay in the starting stage, and the speed compensation coupling strategy is adopted to reduce the speed difference between motors. Furthermore, the neural network PI controller is designed to control the running speed of each motor, which helps the control system to adjust the control parameters adaptively according to the load variation and improve the control accuracy. Finally, the synchronization effect of the proposed adaptive coupling control is compared with that of masterslave control and parallel control by establishing a Simulink simulation model, and the comparison results show that the proposed adaptive coupling control method can make each link in the control cooperate with each other and can achieve better control performance and response speed．

Key words: tunnel boring machine, cutterhead drive system, multimotor synchronization, adaptive control, coupling structure, neural network PI control