Semantic part segmentation method based 3D object pose estimation with RGB-D images for bin-picking

3D object pose estimation for grasping and manipulation is a crucial task in robotic and industrial applications. Robustness and efficiency for robotic manipulation are desirable properties that are still very challenging in complex and cluttered scenes, because 3D objects have different appearances, illumination and occlusion when seen from different viewpoints. This article proposes a Semantic Point Pair Feature (PPF) method for 3D object pose estimation, which combines the semantic image segmentation using deep learning with the voting-based 3D object pose estimation. The Part Mask RCNN ispresented to obtain the semantic object-part segmentation related to the point cloud of object, which is combined with the PPF method for 3D object pose estimation. In order to reduce the cost of collecting datasets in cluttered scenes, a physically-simulated environment is constructed to generate labeled synthetic semantic datasets. Finally, two robotic bin-picking experiments are demonstrated and the Part Mask RCNN for scene segmentation is evaluated through the constructed 3D object datasets. The experimental results show that the proposed Semantic PPF methodimproves the robustness and efficiency of 3D object pose estimation in cluttered scenes with partial occlusions.