Automatic drill pipe emission control system based on machine vision

• Main Authors: Chuntang Zhang, Licong Guan
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: SpringerOpen 2019-04-01
• Series: Journal of Petroleum Exploration and Production Technology
• Subjects: Machine vision; Mechanical arm; Drill pipe emission; Image processing
• Online Access: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13202-019-0656-3

Abstract Drilling is not as modern as other industries and still has great potential for automatic control. Automatic drill pipe emission control system is mostly used for offshore drilling, and the derrick of the land drilling rig cannot be directly compatible with the mature drill pipe emission system of the offshore drilling rig because of its unique structure. Drill pipe emissions from land drilling are usually done by worker-assisted mechanical arm. In this kind of working environment, workers are labor intensive and prone to fatigue and safety cannot be effectively guaranteed. In order to reduce labor intensity and improve drilling efficiency, this paper presents an automatic control system of drill pipe emission based on machine vision. In the control process of the tripping operations, visual servo control is added, and the visual sensor is used to detect the centerline of the drill pipe in real time. After the system finding the deviation between the drill pipe and the mechanical arm, the posture of the arm is adjusted in real time to compensate for the deviation. When the claw mechanism is aligned with the centerline of the drill pipe, the drill pipe manipulator grabs the drill pipe to complete the emission task. In this paper, four methods for extracting the centerline are compared, and the linear regression method is the best.