A novel vision-guided strategy for accurately delivering the drill pipe of the horizontal directional drilling rigs

Abstract

Coal is the most economical fossil energy source in the world, and the automatically drill pipe delivery of the drill rig can greatly reduce the labour intensity of workers. In this paper, we present a 2D vision sensor-based method for locating the delivery drill pipe on a horizontal directional drilling rig, which is achieved by the location of the drill arm position and identification of the drill pipe delivery position of a six-degree-of-freedom robot for underground drilling in coal mines. The identification of the drill pipe positions and delivery of it are realized by monocular vision based on the cooperative targets, which can effectively determine the robot posture positioning and precisely guide the robot to the drill pipe holder position on the drill rig. This method is successfully applied to the control of a practical industrial robot operator. The experimental results verify that our approach indeed enables the robot to automatically load and unload the drill pipe with excellent accuracy in practical applications.