The general method of the tanker car mouth pose measurement

Abstract

Purpose

The coupling process between the loading mechanism and the tank car mouth is a crucial step in the tank car loading process. The purpose of this paper is to design a method to accurately measure the pose of the tanker car.

Design/methodology/approach

The collected image is first subjected to a gray enhancement operation, and the black parts of the image are extracted using Otsu’s threshold segmentation and morphological processing. The edge pixels are then filtered to remove outliers and noise, and the remaining effective points are used to fit the contour information of the tank car mouth. Using the successfully extracted contour information, the pose information of the tank car mouth in the camera coordinate system is obtained by establishing a binocular projection elliptical cone model, and the pixel position of the real circle center is obtained through the projection section. Finally, the binocular triangulation method is used to determine the position information of the tank car mouth in space.

Findings

Experimental results have shown that this method for measuring the position and orientation of the tank car mouth is highly accurate and can meet the requirements for industrial loading accuracy.

Originality/value

A method for extracting the contours of various types of complex tanker mouth is proposed. This method can accurately extract the contour of the tanker mouth when the contour is occluded or disturbed. Based on the binocular elliptic conical model and perspective projection theory, an innovative method for measuring the pose of the tanker mouth is proposed, and according to the space characteristics of the tanker mouth itself, the ambiguity of understanding is removed. This provides a new idea for the automatic loading of ash tank cars.

Citation

Zhou, Y., Wang, L., Lai, Y. and Wang, X. (2023), "The general method of the tanker car mouth pose measurement", Robotic Intelligence and Automation, Vol. 43 No. 6, pp. 625-636. https://doi.org/10.1108/RIA-04-2023-0041