Machine vision system for the control of tunnel boring machines

This paper presents a machine vision system for the control of dual-shield Tunnel Boring Machines. The system consists of a camera with ultra bright LED illumination and a target system consisting of multiple retro-reflectors. The camera mounted on the gripper shield measures the relative position and orientation of the target which is mounted on the cutting shield. In this manner the position of the cutting shield relative to the gripper shield is determined. Morphological operators are used to detect the retro-reflectors in the image and a covariance optimized circle fit is used to determine the center point of each reflector. A graph matching algorithm is used to ensure a robust matching of the constellation of the observed target with the ideal target geometry.