The Acquisition of Position and Orientation of the Conveyor Belt Workpiece Based on the Inter Frame Difference in ROI in Camera Video

Conveyor belt transfer is a widely used transportation means in industry and agriculture, with the help of the robot arms the workpiece on the belt can be picked and placed, replacing human sorters for production lines work. The position and orientation of the workpiece are important for grabbing by the robot arms. The goal of the paper was to investigate the acquisition of the position and orientation of the conveyor belt workpiece by means of the camera video overhead looking down the belt. The proposed method is the inter frame difference in nature, using the conveyor belt background as the first frame, but the other frames were not used wholly as usually, only an ROI all around the conveyor belt in the camera video was chosen, and the inter frame difference was carried out in the ROI. The ROI was of the same width as that of the belt in the video which was known in advance, while the length of the ROI was arbitrary, so one pixel in the frame was scaled to the actual length conveniently. Every read frame behind the background was computed the difference with the background in such ROI, and the four vertexes coordinates of the rectangle workpiece image on the belt were obtained when it passed the ROI, and then the distance apart from the right belt boundary was calculated due to the proportional relation between the width of workpiece and that of the ROI. Two kind workpiece orientation on the belt toward the left and right were judged using the same obtained four vertexes coordinates by means of Euclidian length, and the tilt angle was calculated by arc tangent function in favour of two narrow sides of rectangle workpiece grab. The actual test showed that the method of obtaining the position and orientation of workpiece on the belt proposed in the paper could be realized correctly.

Research on the influence of workpiece orientation during processing in disc centrifugal machine on the geometrical structure of its surface and processing efficiency

The article describes the result of experiments witch were intended to compare the results of different workpieces orientation in disc centrifugal machine. During experimental investigations, particular attention was paid to the optimal orientation the workpiece in working charge. The results of the research presented in this article confirm the benefit of horizontal orientation of the workpiece to the motion of the media in the working charge.