Pose estimation for autonomous grasping with a robotic arm system

A robust and accurate method for estimating the 3-D pose of a planar rigid object is presented. This article demonstrates that 3-D pose estimation becomes feasible by using the 2-D tracking points on an object of scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) and 3-D point cloud detected by stereo vision on an object, assuming that a 3-D geometric model of an object is known a priori. The roll and pitch angles of an object are estimated by the normal vector of approximate plane of 3-D point cloud on an object and the yaw angle is estimated by 2-D tracking point on an object of SIFT. Accurate object detection and localization in the camera coordinate system is crucial for grasping. In the motion planning, the bidirectional rapidly exploring random tree algorithm is used to search for a valid path for efficient grasping. Our robot arm can robustly and autonomously grasp a randomly rotative rigid object detected by SIFT in 3-D space. We have realized a grasping scenario with a dexterous arm (ADAM) such that an object in front of ADAM can be grasped. This demonstration shows how the proposed components build a dexterous and robust system integrating object detection, pose estimation, and motion planning.