Strip Steel Bundling Control System Based on Image Process and Communication Technology

In order to solve the manual bundling problem of a strip steel end, an automatic control system of bundling strip steel based on machine vision is designed. The hardware system is composed of a color camera, an image capture card, a PC, a PLC and actuators. The image process technology is the key to identify and locate the steel end. Graying, contrast-enhancement and smoothness of the image are adopted in the process of pre-processing and in the process of partition and drawing out characteristics of image, edge enhanced and two-value process are used. The communication between PC and SIEMENS PLC is also important problem to implement the motor control and coordinate the actions of the entire system. By programming the communications procedures provided by VB software, Strip steel end bundling process can be monitored and managed effectively. Many experiments have been done and the results proved that, this control system has the advantages of low cost, versatility, high efficiency of communication and meeting the requirements of accuracy and reliability.