The Control System Design of A Mining Device Adapting to the Microtopography of Ocean Cobalt-Rich Crusts

Cobalt-rich crusts are important as a potential resource for the strategic metal cobalt, and they form on a wide-variety of substrate rocks with some microtopographic variations. Therefore, the most important thing to exploit Cobalt-rich crusts is to design a mining device and the corresponding control system which adapts to the microtopography efficiently. The control system of a drum-type cutting head is designed and studied in this paper. The whole system mainly consists of five units: hydraulic unit, microtopography-detecting unit, communication unit, control and display unit and data storage unit. A self-tuning fuzzy PID controller for the control system is designed as well as the parameter display and communication interfaces. Mimetic crusts is also made as samples instead of the real crusts to carry out experiments to test the abilities of each unit and the stability of the whole system