An On-line Automatic Aluminum Wheel Recognition System

Identifying various types of aluminum wheels was traditionally performed manually, which could result in low efficiency, limited reliability, poor accuracy, and high labor cost. This paper presents the design and implementation of an on-line automatic recognition system for aluminum wheels based on laser trigonometry principle. The system mainly consists of a recognition station, two laser displacement sensors, a ball-screw, an industrial computer with data processing software, and a programmable logic controller (PLC). Robust algorithms, as well as an ingenious database for storing information of wheels in different styles and size are introduced for identifying the wheels. The feature data of a special wheel, such as the diameter, thickness and number of spokes, can be determining accurately by scanning the wheel using two laser displacement sensors and compare well with those in the database. Results show that the system identifies each wheel correctly in less than 20 seconds. The stability of this system is excellent. Significant cost saving, low error rate, and high efficiency can be achieved.