FaRo-PPF: Fast and Robust Point Pair Feature for 6D Pose Estimation in Industrial Stamping

Estimating 6D poses of targets efficiently is critical for industrial stamping tasks, in which the Point Pair Feature (PPF) method has been widely used. Based on PPF, this paper proposes Fast and Robust PPF, i.e. FaRo-PPF, which improves PPF in the following three key aspects: adaptive down-sampling based on surface features, point pair matching based on voting ball, and normal-based pose verification. The three designs alleviate existing problems of the local matching stage in PPF, and make FaRo-PPF a stronger method of 6D pose estimation in industrial stamping. To demonstrate the effectiveness of FaRo-PPF, we compare it with PPF on five publically available datasets. Experiment results showed that FaRo-PPF is able to significantly improve accuracy by about 15% and reduce the execution time by about 40% across all test data. We further conduct a grasping and assembly experiment on a physical robot arm, and similar improvement can be observed. FaRo-PPF achieves a higher success rate of assembly and reduces the execution time by about 50%.