Data-Driven Object Pose Estimation in a Practical Bin-Picking Application

This paper addresses the problem of pose estimation from 2D images for textureless industrial metallic parts for a semistructured bin-picking task. The appearance of metallic reflective parts is highly dependent on the camera viewing direction, as well as the distribution of light on the object, making conventional vision-based methods unsuitable for the task. We propose a solution using direct light at a fixed position to the camera, mounted directly on the robot’s gripper, that allows us to take advantage of the reflective properties of the manipulated object. We propose a data-driven approach based on convolutional neural networks (CNN), without the need for a hard-coded geometry of the manipulated object. The solution was modified for an industrial application and extensively tested in a real factory. Our solution uses a cheap 2D camera and allows for a semi-automatic data-gathering process on-site.