Rock recognition using stereo vision for large rock breaking operation

Abstract

At the work front in a quarry, many large rocks are generated by rock blasting. Since some of these rocks are too large to be fed into a rock crusher machine, a hydraulic breaker is used to break the oversized rocks into suitable sizes. The purpose of this study is an automation of rock breaking operation in working front of an open-pit quarry. In this paper we describe an approach using stereo vision to recognize position and shape of large rocks. For rock recognition and rock moving experiments, we set up scaled down experimental environment in laboratory and use small rocks and a robotic manipulator in experiments. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014.