Volume Measurement of the Pulverulent Body Carried by a Conveyor Belt Using Range Sensors

Abstract

Measuring the volume of a pulverulent body carried by a conveyor is important in many construction fields. The paper proposes to use range sensors to get the information on the shape of the pulverulent body. To get high accuracy and precision in the measurement, the paper considers the number and the shape of basis functions to express the body surface, since the variance of the observation noise varies with the number of observation points in the use of range sensors. It is shown that there exist optimal numbers of observation points and basis functions corresponding to the relation between the noise variance and the observation number.