Robust 3D object localization and pose estimation for random bin picking with the 3DMaMa algorithm

Abstract

Enabling robots to automatically locate and pick up randomly placed and oriented objects from a bin is an important challenge in factory automation, replacing tedious and heavy manual labor. A system should be able to recognize and locate objects with a predefined shape and estimate the position with the precision necessary for a gripping robot to pick it up. We describe a system that consists of a structured light instrument for capturing 3D data and a robust approach for object location and pose estimation. The method does not depend on segmentation of range images, but instead searches through pairs of 2D manifolds to localize candidates for object match. This leads to an algorithm that is not very sensitive to scene complexity or the number of objects in the scene. Furthermore, the strategy for candidate search is easily reconfigurable to arbitrary objects. Experiments reported in this paper show the utility of the method on a general random bin picking problem, in this paper exemplified by localization of car parts with random position and orientation. Full pose estimation is done in less than 380 ms per image. We believe that the method is applicable for a wide range of industrial automation problems where precise localization of 3D objects in a scene is needed.