The Design And Implementation Of Unattended Intelligent Stacker Control System

The stacker is an important work equipment in domestic and international coalterminal. Its main function is to remove the coal to the storage yard so that the reclaimercan conveniently proceed to the shipping operation. Traditional stacker operation modehas always been a manual operation, labor-intensive, low degree of automation, moreover,the operational efficiency and the operating level based on the degree of driver fatigue andhis operant level. These drawbacks easily lead to accidents. Therefore, designing a fullyautomatic, all-weather smart stacker control system is of great significance to reduce thedriver’s number, drop labor intensity, improve operating efficiency and quality ofoperations.This paper designed a set of intelligent and unmanned stacker system based onHuanghua Port3stacker. The system consists of three-dimensional modeling of laserscanning and radar ranging system, intelligent stacker control and spatial anti-collisionsystems, PLC control systems, and remote human-machine interface monitoring systemand so on. The principle of this system is divided into three steps: firstly, acquiring the3Dpoint cloud of coal heap in real-time by means of laser scanner, radar and other detectionmethods, furthermore, the standard three-dimensional coal heap model is conversed by3Dpoint cloud after filtering, normalization, mathematical fitting algorithms. Then we writecodes on basis of the stacker driver’s behavior and send commands directly to PLC byOPC interface. Lastly, after receiving the instruction data, PLC control the stacker starting,stopping, walking and so on through its own intelligent automatic operation of theprogram. From the above, the all-weather unmanned automatic operations areaccomplished. Owing to no people on the spot, the instructions of start and stop of stackercan be completed by the dumper driver in remote dumper control room through the remotereview human-machine interface. If the system encounters special circumstances, thedriver is able to complete the stacker operation remotely and semi-automaticly. In order toensure the safety of the big machines in storage yard, the system also develops a stackerfeeder space collision avoidance subsystem which can achieve space positioning byrtk-GPS installed on the stocker and reclaimer. Besides, it is capable of the stocker and reclaimer’s safe operating through the development of intelligent anti-collision softwarethat has the power to send the alarm or stop command when the risk of collision betweentwo or more machines occurs.This system has obvious superiorities in advanced technology, stable and reliable anda high application value shown in Huanghua Port in recent two years.