Localization of insulators in electric distribution systems by using 3D template matching from multiple range images

Kyushu Electric has developed a dual-armed mobile-robot for use in electricity distribution systems. Although some human intervention is still required, the robot greatly reduces the demands on the human operator. In order to automate some of the robot´s capabilities, we have developed a 3D object-localization method for robot positional adjustment. The method is designed to be insensitive to noise and outliers while, at the same time, it has optimal run-time efficiency. The paper first describes our algorithm, and then presents a performance evaluation