Pose Determination of the Disc Cutter Holder of Shield Machine Based on Monocular Vision

The visual measurement system plays a vital role in the disc cutter changing robot of the shield machine, and its accuracy directly determines the success rate of the disc cutter grasping. However, the actual industrial environment with strong noise brings a great challenge to the pose measurement methods. The existing methods are difficult to meet the required accuracy of pose measurement based on machine vision under the disc cutter changing conditions. To solve this problem, we propose a monocular visual pose measurement method consisting of the high precision optimal solution to the PnP problem (OPnP) method and the highly robust distance matching (DM) method. First, the OPnP method is used to calculate the rough pose of the shield machine’s cutter holder, and then the DM method is used to measure its pose accurately. Simulation results show that the proposed monocular measurement method has better accuracy and robustness than the several mainstream PnP methods. The experimental results also show that the maximum error of the proposed method is 0.28° in the direction of rotation and 0.32 mm in the direction of translation, which can meet the measurement accuracy requirement of the vision system of the disc cutter changing robot in practical engineering application.