Instance segmentation based 6D pose estimation of industrial objects using point clouds for robotic bin-picking

3D object pose estimation for robotic grasping and manipulation is a crucial task in the manufacturing industry. In cluttered and occluded scenes, the 6D pose estimation of the low-textured or textureless industrial object is a challenging problem due to the lack of color information. Thus, point cloud that is hardly affected by the lighting conditions is gaining popularity as an alternative solution for pose estimation. This article proposes a deep learning-based pose estimation using point cloud as input, which consists of instance segmentation and instance point cloud pose estimation. The instance segmentation divides the scene point cloud into multiple instance point clouds, and each instance point cloud pose is accurately predicted by fusing the depth and normal feature maps. In order to reduce the time consumption of the dataset acquisition and annotation, a physically-simulated engine is constructed to generate the synthetic dataset. Finally, several experiments are conducted on the public, synthetic and real datasets to verify the effectiveness of the pose estimation network. The experimental results show that the point cloud based pose estimation network can effectively and robustly predict the poses of objects in cluttered and occluded scenes.