A Visual Measurement System for Coil Shipping Automation

During steel-coil shipping, the coil-lifting operation is usually conducted manually by tying a sling belt through the bore hole of the coil, and then the crane moves the coil from the pallet to the ship. To fully automate this process, the key issues are an automated coil lifting mechanism imitating the manual operation and the reliable and accurate recognition methods for coils on a pallet and hold (s) of a ship. This paper proposes a visual measurement system that can detect their dimensions and locations by using various visual sensors. Design of vision systems and their corresponding image processing algorithms will be discussed.