Autonomous pallet localization and picking for industrial forklifts based on the line structured light

This paper proposed an autonomous pallet handing method for industrial forklifts based on the line structured light sensor. The method mainly include two aspects. First, the design of the line structured light sensor based on embedded image processing board that contains a FPGA and a DSP. We solved the problem that Hessian matrix decomposition based light stripe center extraction cannot run in real time. Second, we installed the structured light sensor onto the automatic forklift, and the forklift detected and located the pallet using the geometry character of the pallets, then the controller drived the forklift docking in front of the pallet using position-based visual servoing and picking up the pallet at last. The line structured light sensor was designed using C6000 series visual processing boards developed by our research group. The experiment of the autonomous pallet localization and picking for industrial forklifts verifies the practicability and effectiveness of our proposed method.