Abstract
This paper describes a camera-based position measurement system for automatic tracking control of a rubber Tired Gantry Crane (RTGC). An automatic tracking control of RTGC depends on the ability to measure its displacement and angle from a guide line that the RTGC has to follow. The measurement system proposed in this paper is composed of a camera and a PC that are mounted on the right upper between front and rear tires of the RTGC's side. The measurement accuracy of the system is affected by disturbances such as cracks and stains of the guide line, shadows, and halation from the light fluctuation. To overcome the disturbances, both side edges of the guide line are detected as two straight lines from an input image taken by the camera, and parameters of the straight lines are determined by using Hough transform. The displacement and angle of the RTGC from the guide line can be obtained from these parameters with the robustness against the disturbances. From the experiments with the disturbances, we found the accurate displacement and the angle from the guide line that have the standard deviations of 0.95 pixels and 0.22 degrees, respectively.
