Improved industrial part pose determination based on 3D closed-loop boundaries

Although various pose estimation methods for industrial robots have been studied, there are few methods that can be applied to real industrial environments. The reason is that previous methods cannot be used for a wide range of industrial parts, or the methods have many limitations in a real industrial factory. In this paper, we break through the weakness of the previous 3D closed-loop boundary based industrial part pose estimation method, which can be extracted in the range image provided by a 3D scanner. After extracting the 3D closed-loop boundaries, we make a group with 3D closed-loop boundary sets. Each 3D closed-loop boundary generates the three principal components (eigenvalues and eigenvectors), the centroid of the boundary and topological relationship in the set. Since this proposed method can be applied to the perfect circle 3D closed-loop boundary in industrial parts, it can be employed for more various general-purpose applications. Through experiments on industrial objects and industrial robots, we validate that the proposed method is feasible for real factory environments.