Pose Estimation of Automatic Battery-Replacement System Based on ORB and Improved Keypoints Matching Method

This paper presents an improved Oriented Feature from Accelerated Segment Test (FAST) and Rotated BRIEF (ORB) keypoints matching method for pose estimation of automatic battery-replacement systems. The key issue of the system is how to precisely estimate the pose of the camera in respect to the battery. In our system, the pose-estimation hardware module is mounted onto the robot manipulator, composed of double high brightness LED light source, one monocular camera, and two laser rangefinders. The camera is utilized to take an image of the battery, the laser rangefinders on both sides of the camera are utilized to detect the real-time distance between the battery and the pose-estimation system. The estimation result is significantly influenced by the matching result of the keypoints detected by the ORB technique. The modified matching procedure, based on spatial consistency nearest hamming distance searching method, is used to determine the correct correspondences. Meanwhile, the iterative reprojection error minimization algorithm is utilized to discard incorrect correspondences. Verified by the experiments, the results reveal that this method is highly reliable and able to achieve the required positioning accuracy. The positioning error is lower than 1 mm.