Comparative evaluation of 3D pose estimation of industrial objects in RGB pointclouds

3D pose estimation is a crucial element for enabling robots to work in industrial environment to perform tasks like bin-picking or depalletizing. Even though there exist various pose estimation algorithms, they usually deal with common daily objects applied in lab environments. However, coping with real-world industrial objects is a much harder challenge for most pose estimation techniques due to the difficult material and structural properties of those objects. A comparative evaluation of pose estimation algorithms in regard to these object characteristics has yet to be done. This paper aims to provide a description and evaluation of selected state-of-the-art pose estimation techniques to investigate their object-related performance in terms of time and accuracy. The evaluation shows that there is indeed not a general algorithm which solves the task for all different objects, but it outlines the issues that real-world application have to deal with and what the strengths and weaknesses of the different pose estimation approaches are.