In-Rack Test Tube Pose Estimation Using RGB-D Data
This addresses workforce shortages and safety in biology and medical industries by enabling accurate robotic handling, but it is incremental as it builds on existing object detection and point cloud methods.
The paper tackles the problem of robotic manipulation of test tubes by developing a framework for detecting and estimating poses of in-rack test tubes using RGB-D data, achieving robust pose estimation even with noisy and incomplete point clouds.
Accurate robotic manipulation of test tubes in biology and medical industries is becoming increasingly important to address workforce shortages and improve worker safety. The detection and localization of test tubes are essential for the robots to successfully manipulate test tubes. In this paper, we present a framework to detect and estimate poses for the in-rack test tubes using color and depth data. The methodology involves the utilization of a YOLO object detector to effectively classify and localize both the test tubes and the tube racks within the provided image data. Subsequently, the pose of the tube rack is estimated through point cloud registration techniques. During the process of estimating the poses of the test tubes, we capitalize on constraints derived from the arrangement of rack slots. By employing an optimization-based algorithm, we effectively evaluate and refine the pose of the test tubes. This strategic approach ensures the robustness of pose estimation, even when confronted with noisy and incomplete point cloud data.