MAY 7, 209--Helicopters on board frigates or support ships are an integral part of a ship weapons system. Accordingly, facilities must be provided to enable operation on board even in raging conditions at sea.
To transport the helicopter from the landing deck to the hangar and vice versa, handling systems must secure the ship's helicopter during its travel. The transfer system must be capable of automatically rotating the helicopter and of transporting it to the hangar. The classical approach of performing this operation manually is dangerous and time consuming.
To overcome this, Förder-und Hebesysteme (Delmenhorst, Germany) have developed an automatic helicopter handling system. Positioning the manipulators is based on Halcon image processing software from MVTec Software (Munich, Germany).
In operation, the system automatically locates the wheels of the helicopters and moves the transverse travel unit to them. Two manipulators (one for each wheel of the helicopter) capture flanges at the wheels and rotate the helicopter so that it can be transferred straight on into the hangar.
For more information, go to: http://www.mvtec.com/solutions/fhs-hhs/
-- Posted by Conard Holton, Vision Systems Design, www.vision-systems.com
