Three-dimensional circle detection and location of pipe joints for bin-picking tasks

This paper describes a practical application of visual sensing for detecting and locating pipe joint parts jumbled in a bin. We have focused to detecting three-dimensional circles because each section of the part is visible as a circle in the scene. In addition, we have tried to search another section of the part using stereo ranging to determine the rotation of the part. We first introduce the characteristics of the pipe joint parts and our approach, including three-dimensional circle detection and location of the pipe joint parts. We then describe some experiments in order to evaluate the accuracy of our circle detection and parts location procedures. Finally, we present a discussion of our approach, including implementation in a handling system and application to other sensing systems