Real-time 3-D Pose Estimation Using a High-Speed Range Sensor

This report describes a system which can perform full 3-D pose estimation of a single arbitrarily shaped, rigid object at rates up to 10Hz. A triangular mesh model of the object to be tracked is generated offline using conventional range sensors. Real-time range data of the object is sensed by the CMU high speed VLSI range sensor. Pose estimation is performed by registering the real-time range data to the triangular mesh model using an enhanced implementation of the Iterative Closest Point (ICP) Algorithm introduced by Besl and McKay. The method does not require explicit feature extraction or specification of correspondence. Pose estimation accuracies on the order of 1mm in translation and 1 degree in rotation have been measured.