Prediction of height adjustment of shearer drum based on improved gated recurrent neural network

The adaptive cutting technology of the shearer is a key technology for achieving intelligent mining in fully mechanized working faces. In order to solve the problem of low automatic cutting precision of the shearer in complex coal seams, a prediction method for the height adjustment of shearer drum based on improved gated recurrent neural network (GRU) is proposed. Considering the correlation between adjacent data in the longitudinal and transverse directions of the cutting trajectory, the fixed length sliding time window method is used to obtain the height data of the shearer drum. The input data is divided into continuous and adjustable subsequences, while processing the feature information in the transverse and longitudinal directions. To improve the prediction efficiency of the model and meet the real-time requirements of cyclic cutting, causal convolution gated recurrent unit(CC-GRU) is proposed to perform dual feature extraction and dual data filtering on input data. CC-GRU utilizes causal convolution to focus on the local temporal features in the longitudinal direction of the sequence in advance, in order to reduce computational costs and improve computational speed. CC-GRU uses gating mechanism to serialize and model the features obtained from convolution to capture long-term dependencies between elements. The experimental results show that using the CC-GRU model to predict the height adjustment of the shearer drum, the MAE is 43.80 mm, MAPE is 1.90%, RMSE is 50.35 mm, the determination coefficient is 0.65, and the prediction time is only 0.17 seconds. Compared to long short term memory (LSTM) neural networks, GRU, and temporal convolutional network (TCN), the CC-GRU model has a faster prediction speed and higher prediction precision. It can more accurately predict the height adjustment trajectory of the shearer in real time. This provides a basis for the establishment of coal seam models in the working face and the prediction of the height adjustment trajectory of the shearer.