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MOCONT LOCATION MODULE: A CONTAINER LOCATION
SYSTEM BASED ON DR/DGNSS INTEGRATION
Joseba Landaluze, Victoria del Río, Carlos F. Nicolás, José M. Ezkerra, Ana Martínez
IKERLAN Research Centre, Arizmendiarrieta 2, 20500 Arrasate/Mondragon, The Basque Country (Spain)
Keywords: DR/DGNSS, DR, GPS, DGPS, inertial navigation system, location system
Abstract: The problem of identifying and adequately positioning containers in the terminal yard during handling with
Reach Stackers still remains to be solved in an appropriate manner, while this is extremely important in
making the identification and positioning operations automatic. A precise knowledge in the Terminal
Operating System (TOS) of such data in Real Time would have considerable economic impact on the
logistic treatment of operations. The MOCONT system sets out to provide a solution to this lack. In
particular, the MOCONT Location Module establishes the position of the container in the yard while it is
being handled by a Reach Stacker. This system is based on the integration of the Differential Global
Navigation Satellite System (DGNSS) with a Dead Reckoning (DR) inertial system. This article presents the
general characteristics of the MOCONT Location Module, its structure, and the structure of data fusion,
besides some results obtained experimentally.
1 INTRODUCTION
The problem of localising the containers in the yard
of container terminals had been partially solved for
terminals equipped with huge machines, such as
Rubber Tyre (RTG) and Rail Mounted Gantry
Cranes (RNG) or even Straddle Carriers, but is still a
problem for those terminals equipped with Reach
Stackers or Front Loaders. Moreover, the automatic
identification of containers on board the handling
machine is still a problem remaining to be solved.
The European projects MOCONT (“Monitoring
the yard in container terminals”, IST-1999-10057)
and MOCONT-II (“Monitoring the yard in container
terminals – Trials”, IST-2001-34186), aimed at
providing a system to track the containers in the yard
in Real Time. The projects aimed at developing a
system that automatically identified containers and
localised them when moved by small machines,
called Reach Stackers.
This paper presents the Location Module of the
MOCONT system, developed in said European
projects, and more particularly, the development of
the inertial navigation system or Dead Reckoning
(DR) system. The Location Module is based on the
integration of a Differential Global Navigation
Satellite System (DGNSS) and an inertial DR
system. Data are integrated by means of a Kalman
Filter. This system reckons the position of the
vehicle at all times, improving estimates supplied by
the DGNSS. The exact position of the container is
determined by means of a transformation of
coordinates from the vehicle body since the length
and angle of inclination of the boom are known. The
system is particularly useful when the GNSS does
not supply quality data or is interrupted, due to few
satellites being accessible, multipath phenomena or
due to working inside container canyons or in dark
areas. The DR inertial system is able to continue
estimating vehicle position with precision for short
time intervals, with bounded errors, until GNSS
signals with sufficient quality are available.
In the literature, different structures of inertial
systems appear for land vehicles. The most common
case is the use of a sensor for rotation speed of yaw
angle and odometric information obtained from
vehicle wheels (Aono, 1999; Ramjattan, 1995).
Other redundant sensors are often used to help, each
being different depending on the type of vehicle and
application in question (Aono, 1999; Zhang, 1999).
In some cases, especially in vehicles for agricultural
purposes, a digital compass or a geomagnetic
direction sensor are used instead of a yaw angle
speed gyroscope (Benson, 1998; Zhang, 1999). In
order to avoid errors, which may be introduced by
odometric sensors on wheels due to slipping,
Sukkarieh (1999) proposes an Inertial Measurement
Unit (IMU), comprising three accelerometers, three
227
Landaluze J., del Río V., Nicolás C., Ezkerra J. and Martínez A. (2004).
MOCONT LOCATION MODULE: A CONTAINER LOCATION SYSTEM BASED ON DR/DGNSS INTEGRATION.
In Proceedings of the First International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics, pages 227-234
DOI: 10.5220/0001132802270234
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