Automatic landing method of a reclaimer on the stockpile

The huge reclaimers in the raw ore yard are used to dig ore and transfer it to the blast furnaces. In this paper, an automatic landing method of the reclaimer is proposed to develop an autonomous reclaimer. A 3-dimensional range finder which consists of a 2-dimensional scanner and an additional joint was developed with laser radar concepts and is installed on the roof of the reclaimer to detect the ore pile. A height map is obtained from the acquired range data for an ore pile and a contour map for the pile is obtained through some image processing steps. The optimal landing point in the contour line is determined so that an overload problem does not occur in the slewing operation and reclaiming efficiency is maximized. The algorithm for finding the landing point needs an inverse kinematics solution for the reclaimer. The reclaimer has a redundancy due to the rotating buckets at the end of the its boom. A constraint equation for solving the inverse kinematics of the reclaimer is also derived by the geometrical relationship