Sickle-shaped voxel approach to enhance automatic reclaiming operation using bucket wheel reclaimer

Bulk material is currently reclaimed either manually or semi-automatically due to the lack of integration between stockpile and bucket wheel reclaimer (BWR). Stockpile is stacked in Cartesian coordinate whereas BWR operates in its joint parameter space. The voxel based approach was introduced to improve the extent of automation in reclaiming. In which, stockpile is treated as a combination of small volumes called voxels instead of treating as a single volume. However, the fully automatic reclaiming still has not been realized since voxelization is carried out without considering the reclaiming pattern of the reclaimer. The sickle-shaped voxel is introduced in this paper based on the BWR kinematics to coordinate between the reclaimer and stockpile in voxelization. In addition, solving of the inverse kinematics of a four degrees of freedom BWR and modeling of stockpile contours are conducted in this study for voxelization of a stockpile into sickle-shaped voxels.