Abstract-So far, autonomous order picking (commissioning) systems have not been able to meet the stringent demands regarding speed, safety and accuracy of real-world warehouse automation, resulting in reliance on human workers. In this work we target the next step in autonomous robot commissioning: automatizing the currently manual order picking procedure. To this end, we investigate the use case of autonomous picking and palletizing with a dedicated research platform and discuss lessons learned during testing in simplified warehouse settings. The main theoretical contribution is a novel grasp representation scheme which allows for redundancy in the gripper pose placement. This redundancy is exploited by a local, prioritized kinematic controller which generates reactive manipulator motions on-thefly. We validated our grasping approach by means of a large set of experiments, which yielded an average grasp acquisition time of 23.5 s at a success rate of 94.7 %. Our system is able to autonomously carry out simple order picking tasks in a humansafe manner, and as such serves as an initial step towards future commercial-scale in-house logistics automation solutions.

This article presents a novel approach for vision-based detection and tracking of humans wearing high-visibility clothing with retro-reflective markers. Addressing industrial applications where heavy vehicles operate in the vicinity of humans, we deploy a customized stereo camera setup with active illumination that allows for efficient detection of the reflective patterns created by the worker's safety garments. After segmenting reflective objects from the image background, the interest regions are described with local image feature descriptors and classified in order to discriminate safety garments from other reflective objects in the scene. In a final step, the trajectories of the detected humans are estimated in 3D space relative to the camera. We evaluate our tracking system in two industrial real-world work environments on several challenging video sequences. The experimental results indicate accurate tracking performance and good robustness towards partial occlusions, body pose variation, and a wide range of different illumination conditions.

This paper presents a novel possible solution for people detection and estimation of their 3D position in challenging shared environments. Addressing safety critical applications in industrial environments, we make the basic assumption that people wear reflective vests. In order to detect these vests and to discriminate them from other reflective material, we propose an approach based on a single camera equipped with an IR flash. The camera acquires pairs of images, one with and one without IR flash, in short succession. The images forming a pair are then related to each other through feature tracking, which allows to discard features for which the relative intensity difference is small and which are thus not believed to belong to a reflective vest. Next, the local neighbourhood of the remaining features is further analysed. First, a Random Forest classifier is used to discriminate between features caused by a reflective vest and features caused by some other reflective materials. Second, the distance between the camera and the vest features is estimated using a Random Forest regressor. The proposed system was evaluated in one indoor and two challenging outdoor scenarios. Our results indicate very good classification performance and remarkably accurate distance estimation especially in combination with the SURF descriptor, even under direct exposure to sunlight.

We address the problem of human detection from heavy mobile machinery and robotic equipment operating at industrial working sites. Exploiting the fact that workers are typically obliged to wear high-visibility clothing with reflective markers, we propose a new recognition algorithm that specifically incorporates the highly discriminative features of the safety garments in the detection process. Termed Multiband Hough Forest, our detector fuses the input from active near-infrared (NIR) and RGB color vision to learn a human appearance model that not only allows us to detect and localize industrial workers, but also to estimate their body orientation. We further propose an efficient pipeline for automated generation of training data with high-quality body part annotations that are used in training to increase detector performance. We report a thorough experimental evaluation on challenging image sequences from a real-world production environment, where persons appear in a variety of upright and non-upright body positions.

Abstract-We report on a novel vision-based method for reliable human detection from vehicles operating in industrial environments in the vicinity of workers. By exploiting the fact that reflective vests represent a standard safety equipment on most industrial worksites, we use a single camera system and active IR illumination to detect humans by identifying the reflective vest markers. Adopting a sparse feature based approach, we classify vest markers against other reflective material and perform supervised learning of the object distance based on local image descriptors. The integration of the resulting per-feature 3D position estimates in a particle filter finally allows to perform human tracking in conditions ranging from broad daylight to complete darkness.