This paper researches on machine vision recognition and positioning technique which can help robot automatically recognize and accurately position smart meter in complex industrial environment. Firstly, crude position of the smart meter is obtained by recognition of liquid crystal display (LCD) screen through picture pre-processing. Secondly, the center positions of four screws are identified. Thirdly, the outline of the meter is calculated by geometric locations of the four screws, thus the meter is identified from the image and accurate position of the meter is calculated though the this paper’s algorithm. Experiments show that our algorithm can identify the meter rapidly and calculate the accurate position in complex environment, so the proposed algorithm is practical valuable.