Design of an automated and intelligent rock breaker: Case of Platinum mine platinum company in Zimbabwe

In this system a camera is put overhead of the rock breaker for capturing local images at high spatial resolution. The grizzly is made of a bleach material so that the image background does not portray as ore particles. As the ore sample is being tipped by loader or Load Hull Dumper (LHD) from one end to another, images are captured by the high speed overhead (Charge-Coupled Device) CCD camera. As the images are acquired they are sent into a certain directory in the Programmable Logic Controller (PLC). The trigger configurations for the camera are set to hardware trigger with a falling edge condition using the timer trigger source (but manual trigger was used in simulation). When the CCD camera detects the position of ore on the grizzly the PLC will give a command signal to the motion control that is servo controller to move the boom to the required position for hammering.