Improved autonomous load handling with stereo cameras

We present newly added modules for our autonomous load handling system. The stereo camera system provides information about the scene in front of the automated forklift. A new alternative module for pallet detection is described. Several processing modules for unloading operations are also presented. Our system is evaluated by means of detection rate and by performing field tests. The tests show that it is capable of providing a sufficiently accurate position of the pallets in order to perform loading and unloading operations in multiple scenarios.

[1]  Åke Wernersson,et al.  Docking to pallets with feedback from a sheet-of-light range camera , 2000, Proceedings. 2000 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2000) (Cat. No.00CH37113).

[2]  Pietro Perona,et al.  Fast Feature Pyramids for Object Detection , 2014, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.

[3]  Jonathan M. Roberts,et al.  Vision‐based operations of a large industrial vehicle: Autonomous hot metal carrier , 2008, J. Field Robotics.

[4]  Paul A. Viola,et al.  Multiple Instance Boosting for Object Detection , 2005, NIPS.

[5]  Francesco Biral,et al.  Autonomous pallet localization and picking for industrial forklifts: a robust range and look method , 2011 .

[6]  Emilio Frazzoli,et al.  Closed-loop pallet manipulation in unstructured environments , 2010, 2010 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[7]  Rita Cucchiara,et al.  Focus based Feature Extraction for Pallets Recognition , 2000, BMVC.

[8]  Pietro Perona,et al.  Integral Channel Features , 2009, BMVC.

[9]  Minhwan Kim,et al.  Real-Time Positioning and Orienting of Pallets Based on Monocular Vision , 2008, 2008 20th IEEE International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence.

[10]  Alonzo Kelly,et al.  Model based object pose refinement for terrestrial and space autonomy , 2000 .

[11]  Bernt Schiele,et al.  Ten Years of Pedestrian Detection, What Have We Learned? , 2014, ECCV Workshops.

[12]  Michael Seelinger,et al.  Automatic visual guidance of a forklift engaging a pallet , 2006, Robotics Auton. Syst..

[13]  Bill Triggs,et al.  Histograms of oriented gradients for human detection , 2005, 2005 IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR'05).

[14]  Richard O. Duda,et al.  Use of the Hough transformation to detect lines and curves in pictures , 1972, CACM.

[15]  Roger V. Bostelman,et al.  Visualization of pallets , 2006, SPIE Optics East.