Monitoring and Control System to Falling Position of Outflow Liquid in Automatic Pouring Robot

This paper is concerned with an advanced control system for tilting-ladle type automatic pouring robot used in metal-casting industry. The monitoring and control system to falling position of outflow liquid from the ladle are proposed in this paper. In the monitoring system, the images of outflow liquid are pictured by camera image sensor. The falling position of outflow liquid can be obtained by the edge processing to the outflow liquid in the images. Then, in order to develop the falling position control system, the mathematical model to the falling position is derived from the shape of the ladle and the pouring conditions. The proposed mathematical model is verified using the monitoring system for the falling position of outflow liquid. The falling position control is constructed by feedforward control using the proposed falling position mathematical model. The effectiveness of the proposed control system is verified through the experiments using the automatic pouring robot and the falling position monitoring system.