Volume measurement of the pulverulent body carried by a conveyor belt using range sensors

Measuring the volume of a pulverulent body carried by a conveyor is important in many construction fields. We propose using range sensors to obtain information on the shape of the pulverulent body. We attain high accuracy and precision in the measurement by considering the number and shape of basis functions to express the body surface, since the variance of the observation noise varies with the number of observation points in the use of range sensors. It is shown that there exist optimal numbers of observation points and basis functions corresponding to the relation between the noise variance and the observation number.