Autonomous parking aid for HGVs

If you look at the figures for the Port of Antwerp, the problem quickly becomes clear. With an area of 153 square kilometers, the second largest port in Europe (by turnover in tons) uses an area that is 44 times the size of New York's Central Park. Since the turnover is growing steadily – from 158 million tons (2009) to 238 million (2019) within ten years – and the potential space for expansion and adjacent logistics is limited, the handling of goods must be maximized in the existing area. One way to do this is to shorten the handling times from the adjacent ships to the transport of goods by rail or road.    

After the classic containers, liquid goods form the second largest type of load of the goods handled in Antwerp. Logistics service providers such as ADPO ensure the smooth emptying of tank and liquid container ships. On the left bank of the Scheldt, the company operates a 35-hectare terminal for loading and storing liquid chemicals. ADPO customers store, fill and transport their goods here. The logistics service provider also offers a complete, worry-free package for liquid chemicals logistics – including container cleaning, loading and customs clearance. As port space becomes scarce, ADPO must also increase its efficiency in goods handling.    

Manual filling is inefficient  

Part of the facility on the Schelde is a loading terminal for liquid chemicals, which must first be filled into containers before they can be transported further. Filling was still carried out manually until mid-2019. A truck with empty barrels parked at a loading ramp. The filling was carried out manually with a hose. "But the competition is strong, which is why we also had to automate here in order to increase our efficiency," says Jan van Mechelen, project engineer at ADPO.  

Parking maneuvers damage loading ramps  

In addition to the slow filling speeds, another shortcoming of this solution was that the trucks had to be driven very close to the loading edge. The flap on the truck trailer is only 40 centimeters deep. With a trailer truck of around 18 meters in length, parking backward exactly at a distance of 40 cm is difficult. Until recently, the drivers had to back up slowly until the trailer came into contact with the loading ramp. As a result, the ramp had to be fixed repeatedly, because the constant impact of the truck tore the shock barrier out of the anchors.    

In the course of automating the drum filling process, ADPO in Aalst was looking for an optimized solution for this rustic parking practice. The order was placed with TURCK's Belgian branch Multiprox, which had already demonstrated its problem-solving competence in several projects with ADPO, for example in an automatic access opening for freight trains to the factory site. Turck Multiprox developed an automated parking aid in coordination with the responsible project engineer, Jan van Mechelen: "We did not want to regularly replace the loading racks in the optimized system. In addition, the solution for automated filling should detect the exact position of the truck,” says van Mechelen, describing his idea.    

LED lights indicates distance to ramp  

Turck Multiprox had already developed a solution for similar applications for large logistics companies. A laser scanner monitors one of six parking bays, while LED lights show the driver the current distance to the ramp. If the truck is still far away and the scanner detects no object, the light remains off. As soon as the truck enters the scanner's range, the green LED ring lights up. When the trailer reaches 120 centimeters from the ramp, the yellow ring lights up, and at 40 centimeters, the red ring lights up, prompting the driver to stop the truck.  

With manual filling, the exact truck docking position was not critical because the drums were loaded manually. With automated barrel filling, a conveyor belt moves into the open trailer. An employee places the empty drums onto the belt, and the rest of the filling process takes place automatically. This makes precise parking in the designated bay essential.   

Decentralized solution saves wiring and costs  

The light beacon is connected to a small decentralized control unit, which in turn processes signals from a laser scanner. The laser scanner detects the HGV and outputs its distance from the position of the scanner. Since the scanner was originally designed to open the gate, its three digital output signals had to be adapted for the LED light beacons. TURCK's ARGEE logic controller, which runs decentrally on the FEN20 IP20 I/O module in the switch cabinet, handles this. With simple if/then links, ARGEE translates the digital switching outputs into the corresponding output signals for the light beacon. Even a compact controller would have been too large for this.    

Simple logic commands can be programmed on the FEN20 using the browser-based ARGEE control environment. Programming in this context does not mean writing code. In the Flow Editor, you can use ARGEE to create logical control plans with any web browser using drop-down fields and buttons. The system specialists at TURCK Multiprox adopted this principle for ADPO. "It was important to us that we get a turnkey solution that works straightaway. We didn't want to hire another programmer specifically for this," says van Mechelen.  

Increased safety and efficiency of drum filling  

"The efficiency of the drum-filling process was significantly increased by the automation of the process using the TURCK Multiprox solution. The loading time was simply much longer before. In addition, we have also been able to improve safety, as the scanner also detects people in the parking area," van Mechelen concludes.

Customer | www.adpo.com