An optical non-contact flow-meter of conveyor belt based on FPGA

Aiming at the disadvantages of the existing conveyor belt flow monitoring, this research builds a conveyor belt optical dynamic flow-meter based on field programmable gate array (FPGA) by using FPGA image processing technology and the method of measuring material volume to measure the volume of conveyor belt material, which uses the principle of laser triangulation. The flow-meter takes FPGA as the core and drives two complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) cameras to collect light strips on material surface at the same time. Then, filter, binarization, center extraction and image stitching are performed on the collected light strips. Finally, the material volume is calculated by linear interpolation and Riemann sum. The image acquisition and processing of the flow-meter and the final volume calculation are implemented in the form of hardware in FPGA, the calibration and result display of system parameters is realized in the form of software in advanced RISC machine (ARM). It can be shown that the relative error of the volume measured by the flow-meter is less than 0.05 through experiment, and the material volume flow rate of the conveyor belt can be measured and displayed accurately in real-time, which makes up for the deficiency of the existing flowmeter. This system is of great significance for the informatization transformation of the conveyor belt and the realization of digital production and intelligent manufacturing.