Development of Cell Guide Quality Management System for Container Ships

Abstract

Generally, container ships contain cargo holds with cell guides that serve to increase the container loading and unloading efficiency, minimize the space loss, and fix containers during the voyage. This paper describes a new quality management system for the cell guides of container ships (the so-called Trim Cell Guide system). The main functions of this system are the trimming of the point cloud obtained using a 3D scanner and an inspection simulation for cell guide quality. In other words, the raw point cloud of cell guides after construction is measured using a 3D scanner. Here, the raw point cloud contains a lot of noise and unnecessary information. Using the GUI interface supported by the system, the raw point cloud can be trimmed. The trimmed point cloud is used in a simulation for cell guide quality inspection. The RANSAC (Random Sample Consensus) algorithm is used for the transverse section representation of a cell guide at a certain height and applied for the calculation of the intervals between the cell guides and container. When the container hits the cell guides during the inspection simulation, the container is rotated horizontally and checked again for a possible collision. It focuses on a system that can be simulated with the same inspection process as in a shipyard. For a practicality review, we compared the precision data gained from an inspection simulation with the measured data. As a result, it was confirmed that these values were within approximately ±2 mm.