An Improved Robust Method for Pose Estimation of Cylindrical Parts with Interference Features

Horizontal docking assembly is a fundamental process in the aerospace assembly, where intelligent measurement and adjustable support systems are urgently needed to achieve higher automation and precision. Thus, a laser scanning approach is employed to obtain the point cloud from a laser scanning sensor. And a method of section profile fitting is put forward to solve the pose parameters from the data cloud acquired by the laser scanning sensor. Firstly, the data is segmented into planar profiles by a series of parallel planes, and ellipse fitting is employed to estimate each center of the section profiles. Secondly, the pose of the part can be obtained through a spatial straight line fitting with these profile centers. However, there may be some interference features on the surface of the parts in the practical assembly process, which will cause negative effects to the measurement. Aiming at the interferences, a robust method improved from M-estimation and RANSAC is proposed to enhance the measurement robustness. The proportion of the inner points in a whole profile point set is set as a judgment criterion to validate each planar profile. Finally, a prototype is fabricated, a series of experiments have been conducted to verify the proposed method.