Three-dimensional pose determination for a humanoid robot using binocular head system

There has been much interests on three-dimensional pose estimation of an object since there are a lot of robotic applications such as intelligent robotic assembly and/or vision-guided control of a humanoid or human-friendly robot. In this paper, there are proposed a simple and fast stereo matching algorithm for real-time robotic applications and an improved scheme for feature matching using three-dimensional information by adopting backprojection as a feedback element measuring the degree of feature matching. The degree of feature matching is determined by checking existence ratio of each feature point in real images after back-projecting an object model into image plane. The proposed pose determination algorithm is applied for a humanoid robot in KIST, whose name is CENTAUR, successfully and determine the pose of several polyhedral objects using 3D information of vertexes on the outline of an object in image plane