Recently, a customer involved with making autonomously operated excavators has adopted DIS Sensors’ Dynamic Inclination Sensors to determine the pitch and roll of the operator’s cab.
DIS Sensors’ Dynamic Inclination Sensors are specially designed to be used in machinery that has multiple axes of movement. As such, the sensors are perfect for heavy mobile equipment. The integrator on this project has chosen a combination of both single-axis and dual-axes QG65 Dynamic Inclination Sensors with CANOpen outputs.
The pitch and roll of the machine’s cab, along with auxiliary sensors on the boom, arm, and bucket, is critical feedback for retrofitting a machine for autonomous controls. Centripetal forces from rapid rotation in most standard inclinometers can sometimes manifest itself as angular change. Finding a sensor that separated the rotary motion and external vibrations from the true pitch and roll was important to this customer. After their initial testing of a set of QG65D sensors, the customer provided the following feedback:
“We did more testing on all the makes of sensors we have here at hand and found an issue with most of them with the readings jumping several degrees when transitioning from dynamic to static measurement. The only sensors that didn’t do that are the ones we got from you.”
The dynamic series inclinometer includes a series of algorithms that better fine tunes the inclinometer for the condition. These algorithms can also isolate the external axis rotation from the actual angle.
Below is an example of a comparison between a QG65 standard static inclinometer shown in green to a QG65D dynamically compensated inclinometer shown in blue. The Dynamic Inclinometer clearly minimizes the effects of off-axis movement on the X and Y axis inclination outputs.
Application is courtesy of Laser-View Technologies, Inc. in Chester Springs, Pennsylvania, USA
Interested in learning more? Contact Laser-View Technologies today for additional information!
