Registration of a known CAD model into the workspace frame of a robot

In many robotic applications it is required to manipulate a specific rigid object whose CAD model is known a priori, but its position and orientation in space are unknown. This category of tasks includes piercing, painting or iron welding on some specific points of the rigid object. For this kind of tasks to become feasible the CAD data of the rigid object should be registered into the robot's workspace frame, so that the robot arm becomes aware of the position and orientation of the rigid body with reference to its own base coordinate frame. In order to achieve this goal several techniques from the fields of image processing, pattern analysis and robot kinematics should be combined. This paper provides a convenient combination of such methods that can be used successfully for the real-time registration of the rigid object CAD data to the robot's base frame.