Volumetric Measurement of Rectangular Parcel Box Using LiDAR Depth Camera for Dimensioning and 3D Bin Packing Applications

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is becoming an integral part of today's factory operation and warehouse management. Instead of relying on human to perform repetitive tasks, an automated system can perform such tasks with higher productivity and lower operating cost. In a logistics industry, one such common task is the determination of size and dimension of boxes that arrive at the warehouse for inventory management purposes. Traditionally, a worker would need to perform the measurement manually, which can be labor intensive and the result is prone to human error. In this paper, we propose an automated, volumetric measurement system for rectangular parcel box based on single LiDAR depth camera. The system relies on captured depth information and applies flood fill algorithm to detect the top plane in order to extract the width, length, and height dimensions of the box. Additional height accuracy can be attained by using grid sampling and adding manual offset to account for box deformation. Based on our test case scenarios, the accuracy of the system shows a measurement error of <5% across the different dimensions and an average processing time of 1.01 seconds.