A Practical Visual Positioning Method for Industrial Overhead Crane Systems

To solve the problem of information acquisition of an industrial overhead crane, this paper uses an industrial camera to get the information. The information includes the height and the swing angle of the hook and the distance between the hook and the cargo. To obtain the real-time data of the hook’s height and swing angle, firstly the whole image captured by the industrial camera is processed and the hook’s initial position is obtained by shape matching. As the trolley tracks the hook according to the local information of the image, the height is calculated by the interpolation method according to the number of local pixels. The swing angle is measured by the height of the hook and the distance between the initial and current positions of the upper edge. In addition to the measurement of the height and swing angle, this platform calculates the distance between the hook and the cargo based on a visual method, the cargo is observed by such features as length, width and height input by operators. This method gets the static information of the industrial scene, drives the trolley to the cargo, detects whether the hook’s swing is within the proper range, and hoists the hook to the desired position. Experimental results on a 32-ton industrial crane system implies that this algorithm solves the problem of information collection and transfers the hook to a desired position.