Remote position detection of steel coils using 2D laser scanners: Two-line-tracker

It is important to measure the position of steel coils, especially when automatically transporting them by crane in the relevant industry. To realize a fully automatic coil transporting system, the positions of coils relative to the crane must be measured accurately. This paper introduces a measurement system that can detect positions of the target coil with high robustness and accuracy using 2-D laser sensors. The proposed system can derive the radius, length of a coil, which can be in various sizes, without using any prior informations about the coil. Based on the detected dimensions of the target coil, the sensor system can calculate the positions of coil in real time from a remote distance. The performance of the system is validated through experiments conducted on actual coils, which showed that the precision is within 30mm from a distance range of 5 meters.