Pose Estimation of Instruments for Automatic Chemical Laboratories Using Multi-Level Template Matching

In chemical laboratories, robot operation of instruments often relies on structured auxiliary positioning and teaching methods, which are complicated and laborious. Moreover, the single color, sparse textures, and uneven scales of instruments make the accuracy and robustness of existing visual 6-Dof pose estimation methods difficult to meet the requirement of robot operation. Therefore, we propose a novel pose estimation approach for automatic chemical laboratories using multi-level template matching to assist robots in operating instruments. This approach matches the query image with templates step by step from three levels: template, image, and pixel. During the matching processes from global to local, it achieves prediction of 2D key-point coordinates to accurately estimate instrument pose. At the same time, a template searching method based on the distribution pattern of feature points is proposed to ensure the accuracy of template searching in the real world. The experimental results show that our approach has good robustness and accuracy and meets the requirement of robot operation in automatic chemical laboratories. Note to Practitioners—This paper was motivated by the positioning problem of robot operation for instruments in automatic chemical laboratories. Structured auxiliary positioning methods are complicated and most of the pose estimation works are not suitable for practical applications at present. This paper suggests a novel template searching method and a pose estimation approach using multi-level matching for instruments. We calculate the distances, angles and point number of feature points to construct a new feature searching the best matched template with the input image. Then the predefined key pixels of the template are transformed into the input image from coarse to fine matching to ensure the accuracy and robustness. Due to the instrument CAD model, we can obtain the 2D-3D correspondences and calculate pose of the instrument by the PnP method. The experiment results validate that our method is suitable for practical robot operation in automatic chemical laboratories.