Measurement of idlers rotation speed in belt conveyors based on image data analysis for diagnostic purposes
Przemysław Dąbek, Pavlo Krot, Jacek Wodecki, Paweł Zimroz, Jarosław Szrek, Radosław Zimroz
Abstract
It is a challenge for mining enterprises to diagnose the belt conveyors, which length can be tens of kilometres and the number of idlers reaches several thousand. All of them require inspection, which is infeasible to perform using monitoring sensors, such as accelerometers. The authors proposed a novel method for the rotational speed measurement of idlers based on image data analysis. The relation is assumed of the rotation speed decrease due to internal defects. The procedure of visual data processing is verified on the real conveyor idlers. The remote sensing method can be applied in mobile inspection robots such as UAVs or UGVs as well as for manual camera recordings. The accuracy of the proposed method is 0.13-0.67% error depending on the speed range, which is provided by the standard sampling rates (30-60 FPS) and video resolution (1280 x 720 px). Recommendations are formulated for method implementation in practice.