Accurate pose measurement of label-attached small objects using a 3D vision technique

Bin picking is a task of picking a small object from a bin. For accurate bin picking, the 3D pose information, position, and orientation of a small object is required because the object is mixed with other objects of the same type in the bin. Using this 3D pose information, a robotic gripper can pick an object using exact distance and orientation measurements. In this paper, we propose a 3D vision technique for accurate measurement of 3D position and orientation of small objects, on which a paper label is stuck to the surface. We use a maximally stable extremal regions (MSERs) algorithm to detect the label areas in a left bin image acquired from a stereo camera. In each label area, image features are detected and their correlation with a right image is determined by a stereo vision technique. Then, the 3D position and orientation of the objects are measured accurately using a transformation from the camera coordinate system to the new label coordinate system. For stable measurement during a bin picking task, the pose information is filtered by averaging at fixed time intervals. Our experimental results indicate that the proposed technique yields pose accuracy between 0.4~0.5mm in positional measurements and 0.2-0.6° in angle measurements.