PanelPose: A 6D Pose Estimation of Highly-Variable Panel Object for Robotic Robust Cockpit Panel Inspection

In robotic cockpit inspection scenarios, the 6D pose of highly-variable panel objects is necessary. However, the buttons with different states on the panel cause the variable texture and point cloud, which confuses the traditional invariable object pose estimation method. The bottleneck is the variable texture and point cloud. To address this issue, we propose a simple yet effective method denoted as PanelPose that leverages synthetic data and edge-line features. Specifically, we extract edge and line features of RGB images and fuse these feature maps as a multi-feature fusion map (MFF Map) to focus on the shape features of panel objects. Moreover, we design an effective keypoint selection algorithm considering the shape information of panel objects, which simplifies keypoint localization for precise pose estimation. Finally, the panel object pose is estimated via PNP/RANSAC, refined by the multi-state template (MST) and multi-scale ICP. We experimentally show that state-of-the-art 6D pose estimation methods alone are not sufficient to solve the cockpit panel inspection task but that our method significantly improves the performance. In cockpit inspection scenarios, the panel localization error is less than 3mm using our method. Code and data are available at https://github.com/sunhan1997/PaneIPose.