The Use of a Stereovision System in Shape Detection of the Side Surface of the Body of the Mining Machine Working Unit

Ensuring the compliance of the finished product with the project during the manufacturing of cutting heads/drums of the mining machines, largely determines the efficiency of rock mining, especially hard-to-cut rocks. The manufacturing process of these crucial elements of cutting machines is being robotized in order to ensure high accuracy and repeatability. This determines, among others the need to assess in real-time the degree of the approach of pick holders positioned by the industrial robot to the side surface of the working unit of the cutting machine in their target position. This problem is particularly important when in the manufacturing process are used the bodies of decommissioned cutting heads/drums, from which old pick holders have been removed. The shape and external dimensions of these hulls, unless they are subjected to regeneration, may differ quite significantly from the nominal ones. The publication, on the example of a road header cutting head, presents the procedure for automatically identifying and indexing markers displayed on its side surface, recorded on measuring photos by two digital cameras of a 3D vision system. Experimental research of the developed method was carried out using the KUKA VisionTech vision system installed on the test stand in the robotics laboratory of the Department of Mining Mechanization and Robotization at the Faculty of Mining, Safety Engineering and Industrial Automation of the Silesian University of Technology. Data processing was carried out in the Matlab environment using the libraries of the Image Processing Toolbox. The functions provided in this library were used in the developed algorithm, implemented in the software. This algorithm allows automatic identification of markers located in the images of the side surface of the cutting head. This is the basis for determining their location in space. The publication presents a method of segmenting images recorded by cameras into homogeneous areas. The method of separating interesting areas from the image by comparison to the pattern was presented. Also shown is the method of the automatic numbering of mutually matching pairs of markers on photos from two cameras included in the vision system depending on the spatial orientation of the marker grid in the measuring images.