Position Verification

We have an application for a loader that moves in front of different equipment (10-12 different pieces of equipment). I'd like an easy way for the loader to know which piece of equipment it is in front of as the loading positions are slightly different for each. This would prevent the operator from having to manually set things (and screw it up). The loader has a PLC/HMI.

I thought of maybe RFID, but that seems a little expensive. A distance sensor could work, but depending on how far the equipment is spaced out (50-150 feet normally) that might not be that cheap either. Maybe a barcode or qr code reader?

Anyone do something like this?

1 Slot of inputs dedicated to this purpose.

A plug to connect the two machines with 16 pns in each plug. Each machine would have a jumper to a different pin so a different input would light up from each machine when plugging them into the very same connection point on the loader.

Hope it makes sense. The simplest way I can thing of.

More involved would be to have an Ethernet connection between the loader and the 15 different machines. Each one could identify itself simply with a Produced/Consumed tag. This is how I would set it up.

In either scenario, the loader would know which heartbeat it can see, therefore know which program to run.

What moves the loader?

RFID isn't that expensive. You would only need one reader and then a few tokens.

Rob... said:

What moves the loader?

RFID isn't that expensive. You would only need one reader and then a few tokens.

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It's positioned in front of the equipment manually by the operator. Once it's in position the operator initiates the loading/unloading, but the reach distances are a little different for each location so they would have to select which reach they want. I'd like to remove this step.

If there were only a few positions, I'd just use a 3 or 4 way selector.

Four proxes on the loader and a different combination of targets at each position so that for each position you get a different set of proxes in the on state. That gives you sixteen possible target combinations, but don't try to use the combination of all four proxes in the off state. So you get fifteen useful combinations where at least one prox is on.

I would probably opt for distance measurement because it would be more flexible and easier to implement. I seen radar or laser sensor and some of those are under $1k.

I have done many systems similar to that. use a laser measurement system and have a preset for each peace of equipment. Use a button selector panel the operator selects where they want to load and the controller will travel to the requested position every time. Clean Simple and Fast

Thanks for infoamation guys! You helped me a lot.