Outflow Liquid Falling Position Control Considering Lower Pouring Mouth Position with Collision Avoidance for Tilting-Type Automatic Pouring Machine

Abstract

This paper presents an advanced control system for tilting-ladle-type automatic pouring machines used in the metal casting industry. In order to pour liquid from the lowest possible position, an approach for motion trajectory generation of pouring ladle is proposed in this paper. The proposed approach controls the falling position of outflow liquid and avoids collision between ladle and obstacles. This approach defined three pouring modes derived from the positional relation between ladle and obstacles. Pouring mode switching was also proposed to shift to the lowest pouring mode depending on pouring conditions and ladle posture. An analytical algorithm of the falling position control system was built. The effectiveness of the proposed control system was validated through experiments using a laboratory automatic pouring machine with a monitoring system.