Development of Guide Line Position Measurement System using a Camera for RTGC Tracking Control

The handling ability of containers at the terminal strongly depends on the performance of the cargo handling system such as RTGC(Rubber Tired Gantry Crane). This paper introduces a new guide line position measurement method using a camera for the RTGC which plays a important role in the harbor area. Because the line tracking is the basic technique for control system design of RTGC, it is necessary to develop a useful and reliable measurement system. If the displacement and angle of the RTGC relative to a guide line as trajectory to follow is obtained, the position of RTGC is calculated. Therefore, in this paper, a camera-based measurement system is introduced. The proposed measurement system is robust against light fluctuation and cracks of the guideline. This system consists of a camera and a PC which are installed at the lower side of the RTGC. Two edges of the guide line are detected from an input image taken by the camera, and these positions are determined in a Hough parameter space by using the Hough transformation method. From the experimental results, high accurate standard deviations were found as 0.98 pixel of the displacement and 0.24 degree of the angle, including robustness against lighting fluctuation and cracks of the guide line also.