On April 28, 2026 (Tuesday) at 2:00 pm in room 503 of IMI-BAS
Mihail Mukov (Intellics Engineering)
will give a talk at the Operations Research, Probability and Statistics Seminar on:
Modeling Lifting Systems in Waste Collection
.
Abstract:
This presentation considers the problem of estimating the mass of waste emptied from individual containers by a garbage truck equipped with standard lifting forks for both large 1100-liter containers and smaller waste bins.
The main objective is to develop a low-cost measurement system that can be applied to a wide range of truck configurations with only minimal hardware modification.
The system combines an oil pressure sensor installed in the hydraulic circuit and a standard smartphone inertial measurement unit fixed on the lifting arm.
The pressure sensor provides a measure for determining the lifting force, while the accelerometer and gyroscope are used to estimate the motion of the lifting arm. From these measurements and a calibrated model, the dumped waste is determined.
The main focus of the presentation is the physical and mathematical structure of the method. This includes:
- Virtual reorientation of the sensor to the truck coordinate system.
- Preprocessing of raw sensor data.
- Removing gyroscope drift.
- Integration of angular velocity to obtain absolute rotation angle.
- Physical model with unknown parameters, formulated in a form suitable for regression-based calibration.
- Gradient descent approach, used for automatic identification of optimal measurement position.
- Linear approximation of the exponential dependence of oil viscosity on temperature, allowing the system to remain usable at low winter temperatures.
The lecture is based on a joint research with Damyan Kalaglarsky (Intellics Eng.) and Prof. Dsc. Ognyan Kounchev (IMI-BAS).
Everyone interested in the topic is cordially invited to participate.