In order to realize the autonomous cutting for tunneling robot, the method of cutting trajectory planning of sections with complex composition was proposed. Firstly, based on the multi-sensor parameters, the existence, the location, and size of the dirt band were determined. The roadway section environment was modeled by grid method. Secondly, according to the cutting process and tunneling cutting characteristics, the cutting trajectory ant colony algorithm was proposed. To ensure the operation safety and avoid the cutting head collision, the expanding operation was adopt for dirt band, and the aborting strategy for the ants trapped in the local optimum was put forward to strengthen the pheromone concentration of the found path. The simulation results showed that the proposed method can be used to plan the optimal cutting trajectory. The ant colony algorithm was used to search for the shortest path to avoid collision with the dirt band, and the S-path cutting was used for the left area to fulfill section forming by following complete cover principle. All the ants have found the optimal path within 50 times iteration of the algorithm, and the simulation results were better than particle swarm optimization and basic ant colony optimization.
