Arrangement for, and method of, loading freight into a shipping container

• Main Authors: Brown, Patrick Martin, Nanda, Chinmay, Seiter, Paul, Swope, Charles B
• Format: Patent
• Language: English
• Published: 21.07.2020
• Subjects: CALCULATING; COMPUTING; CONVEYING; COUNTING; ELECTRIC COMMUNICATION TECHNIQUE; ELECTRICITY; HANDLING THIN OR FILAMENTARY MATERIAL; IMAGE DATA PROCESSING OR GENERATION, IN GENERAL; PACKING; PERFORMING OPERATIONS; PHYSICS; PICTORIAL COMMUNICATION, e.g. TELEVISION; PNEUMATIC TUBE CONVEYORS; SHOP CONVEYOR SYSTEMS; STORING; TRANSPORT OR STORAGE DEVICES, e.g. CONVEYORS FOR LOADING ORTIPPING; TRANSPORTING

A plurality of three-dimensional (3D) cameras is deployed about a zone through which freight is conveyed to a shipping container. The 3D cameras have sensors with fields of view over which a plurality of point clouds of voxels are captured from the freight. A server combines the point clouds to obtain a composite point cloud of the freight, encloses the composite point cloud with a bounding box having dimensions, and dimensions the freight from the dimensions of the bounding box. An optional scale weighs the freight while it is being dimensioned and moved through the zone.