Industrial robots need to accurately identify the position and rotation angle of the handwheel of chemical raw material barrel valves during the process of opening and closing, in order to avoid interference between the robot gripper and the handwheel. This paper proposes a handwheel keypoint detection algorithm for fast and accurate acquisition of handwheel position and rotation pose. The algorithm is based on the Keypoint R-CNN (Region-based Convolutional Neural Network) keypoint detection model, which integrates the lightweight mobile network MobileNetV3, the Coordinate Attention module, and improved BiFPN (Bi-directional Feature Pyramid Network) structure to improve the detection speed of the model, enhance the feature extraction performance of the handwheel, and improve the expression capability of small targets at keypoint locations. Experimental results on a self-built handwheel dataset demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms the Keypoint R-CNN model in terms of detection speed and accuracy, with a speed improvement of 54.6%. The detection accuracy and keypoint detection accuracy reach 93.3% and 98.7%, respectively, meeting the requirements of the application scenario and enabling accurate control of the robot’s rotation of the valve handwheel.