Abstract:

A new method of goods contour detection and positioning by a vision robot was proposed. Based on image pre-processing and the Sobel operator, the edgeof goods and its container I_1［i,j］ was detected. The goods-supporting area and its edge image I2［i,j］ were calculated by image projection. Then anothergoodssupporting area’s edge image I3［i,j］ was obtained according to the Cannyoperatorand the breakpoints in I2［i,j］ were connected by comparing with I3［i,j］. Finally, the contour was extracted by the contour extraction method to locate the target and the robot was controlled to pick the goods. The experiments show that the method is effective and reliable.

Key words: computer vision; edge detection; contour extraction; vision robot; goods picking