Volume Measurement For Silos

Silos are large containers that can hold materials like sand, grain, or fermented feed. Since containers are large, remotely managing the storage is a challenging task. The grain poured into the silos form the uneven surface, collecting the data and calculating the volume of an uneven surface is the main aim of the experiment. These large structures can be of different sizes ranging from 20 to 40 meters in height. The whole structure of the silo looks like a cylinder with a cone-shaped top and there can be two types according to the shape of the base, cone based or flat based. LIDAR (Light Detection and ranging) sensor, a distance measuring device is used to generate 3D point cloud data. It works mainly on the principle of time of flight. Pan and tilt mechanism allows the sensor to rotate 360 degrees on one axis and 180 degrees on another axis. With the help of this mechanism, distance to most of the points inside the silos is measured. The 3D coordinates are mapped with the distance information from the sensor and also a visualization is done using python programming. Along with this, the volume of grain is also calculated.