An Automatic Weight Measurement of Rope Using Computer Vision

Recently, the computer vision such as part measurement, and product inspection is very popular to achieve the factory automation since the labor cost is dramatically increasing. In this paper, the diameter and the length of rope are measured by CCD camera which is orthogonally mounted on the ceiling. Two parameters which are the diameter and the length of rope are used to measure the weight of rope. If the weight of rope is reached to predetermined weight, the information is transmitted to PLC(programmable logic control) to cut the rope on the wheel. The cutting machine cuts the rope according to the information obtained from the CCD camera. To measure the diameter and length of rope on real time, the searching space for image segmentation is restricted the predetermined area according to the camera calibration position. Finally, to estimate the weight of rope, the knowledge base system which depends on the diameter, the length of rope, and weight relation between these information are constructed according to diameters of rope. This method contributes to achieve the factory automation, and reduce the production cost since the operators are unnecessary to measure the weight of rope by try-and-error method.