The Halcon 8.0 software library for machine vision from MVTec (Munich, Germany) enables the identification of arbitrarily orientated objects as a standard technology, and will be particularly useful for bin picking applications.
Up to now, Halcon’s powerful shape-based matching already allowed the fast, reliable, and robust identification of 2D objects. With the new version 8.0, this also applies for 3D objects in arbitrary 3D positions and orientations. For this purpose, only a CAD model of the object has to be imported and trained, so version 8.0 was extended to support the industrial standard to read DXF files.
During the training of the CAD model, Halcon computes the two-dimensional projections of the possible 3D poses of the object onto the image. Therefore, the imaging system needs only one camera. Primarily, the 3D object recognition by Halcon provides new possibilities for robotics. Time-consuming special programming as well as stereo assemblies with two cameras are no longer necessary. Now, robots can identify scattered objects in their exact 3D pose and pick them up.
Because of its speed, Halcons’s 3rd generation matching also enables real-time applications. The 3D object recognition is not only fast and reliable, but also robust against variable illumination.
