Localization of objects in electric distribution systems by using segmentation and 3D template matching with M-estimators

Semi-automatic mobile-robots for maintaining works in electric distribution systems have been developed by Kyushu Electric Power Company in Japan. This robot can greatly reduce the demands on the human operator, although some human intervention is still required to perform such tasks as insulator recognition, positional adjustments of the robot, and guidance toward electric lines and insulators. We develop a 3D object recognition and localization system for robot's positional adjustment. For localization to be useful and practical, the method is designed to be insensitive to outliers. Our algorithm is general enough to be applied not only to our dual-armed mobile robots but also to other teleoperation robots. This algorithm should greatly reduce the burden of human operators when it is applied to the robot. This paper first describes our algorithm, and then presents a performance evaluation.