IndustryShapes: An RGB-D Benchmark dataset for 6D object pose estimation of industrial assembly components and tools

We introduce IndustryShapes, a new RGB-D benchmark dataset of industrial tools and components, designed for both instance-level and novel object 6D pose estimation approaches. The dataset provides a realistic and application-relevant testbed for benchmarking these methods in the context of industrial robotics bridging the gap between lab-based research and deployment in real-world manufacturing scenarios. Unlike many previous datasets that focus on household or consumer products or use synthetic, clean tabletop datasets, or objects captured solely in controlled lab environments, IndustryShapes introduces five new object types with challenging properties, also captured in realistic industrial assembly settings. The dataset has diverse complexity, from simple to more challenging scenes, with single and multiple objects, including scenes with multiple instances of the same object and it is organized in two parts: the classic set and the extended set. The classic set includes a total of 4,6k images and 6k annotated poses. The extended set introduces additional data modalities to support the evaluation of model-free and sequence-based approaches. To the best of our knowledge, IndustryShapes is the first dataset to offer RGB-D static onboarding sequences. We further evaluate the dataset on a representative set of state-of-the art methods for instance-based and novel object 6D pose estimation, including also object detection, segmentation, showing that there is room for improvement in this domain. The dataset page can be found in https://pose-lab.github.io/IndustryShapes.

In-Hand Object Pose Estimation via Visual-Tactile Fusion

Accurate in-hand pose estimation is crucial for robotic object manipulation, but visual occlusion remains a major challenge for vision-based approaches. This paper presents an approach to robotic in-hand object pose estimation, combining visual and tactile information to accurately determine the position and orientation of objects grasped by a robotic hand. We address the challenge of visual occlusion by fusing visual information from a wrist-mounted RGB-D camera with tactile information from vision-based tactile sensors mounted on the fingertips of a robotic gripper. Our approach employs a weighting and sensor fusion module to combine point clouds from heterogeneous sensor types and control each modality's contribution to the pose estimation process. We use an augmented Iterative Closest Point (ICP) algorithm adapted for weighted point clouds to estimate the 6D object pose. Our experiments show that incorporating tactile information significantly improves pose estimation accuracy, particularly when occlusion is high. Our method achieves an average pose estimation error of 7.5 mm and 16.7 degrees, outperforming vision-only baselines by up to 20%. We also demonstrate the ability of our method to perform precise object manipulation in a real-world insertion task.

SurgPose: Generalisable Surgical Instrument Pose Estimation using Zero-Shot Learning and Stereo Vision

Accurate pose estimation of surgical tools in Robot-assisted Minimally Invasive Surgery (RMIS) is essential for surgical navigation and robot control. While traditional marker-based methods offer accuracy, they face challenges with occlusions, reflections, and tool-specific designs. Similarly, supervised learning methods require extensive training on annotated datasets, limiting their adaptability to new tools. Despite their success in other domains, zero-shot pose estimation models remain unexplored in RMIS for pose estimation of surgical instruments, creating a gap in generalising to unseen surgical tools. This paper presents a novel 6 Degrees of Freedom (DoF) pose estimation pipeline for surgical instruments, leveraging state-of-the-art zero-shot RGB-D models like the FoundationPose and SAM-6D. We advanced these models by incorporating vision-based depth estimation using the RAFT-Stereo method, for robust depth estimation in reflective and textureless environments. Additionally, we enhanced SAM-6D by replacing its instance segmentation module, Segment Anything Model (SAM), with a fine-tuned Mask R-CNN, significantly boosting segmentation accuracy in occluded and complex conditions. Extensive validation reveals that our enhanced SAM-6D surpasses FoundationPose in zero-shot pose estimation of unseen surgical instruments, setting a new benchmark for zero-shot RGB-D pose estimation in RMIS. This work enhances the generalisability of pose estimation for unseen objects and pioneers the application of RGB-D zero-shot methods in RMIS.

One2Any: One-Reference 6D Pose Estimation for Any Object

6D object pose estimation remains challenging for many applications due to dependencies on complete 3D models, multi-view images, or training limited to specific object categories. These requirements make generalization to novel objects difficult for which neither 3D models nor multi-view images may be available. To address this, we propose a novel method One2Any that estimates the relative 6-degrees of freedom (DOF) object pose using only a single reference-single query RGB-D image, without prior knowledge of its 3D model, multi-view data, or category constraints. We treat object pose estimation as an encoding-decoding process, first, we obtain a comprehensive Reference Object Pose Embedding (ROPE) that encodes an object shape, orientation, and texture from a single reference view. Using this embedding, a U-Net-based pose decoding module produces Reference Object Coordinate (ROC) for new views, enabling fast and accurate pose estimation. This simple encoding-decoding framework allows our model to be trained on any pair-wise pose data, enabling large-scale training and demonstrating great scalability. Experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that our model generalizes well to novel objects, achieving state-of-the-art accuracy and robustness even rivaling methods that require multi-view or CAD inputs, at a fraction of compute.

CAP-Net: A Unified Network for 6D Pose and Size Estimation of Categorical Articulated Parts from a Single RGB-D Image

This paper tackles category-level pose estimation of articulated objects in robotic manipulation tasks and introduces a new benchmark dataset. While recent methods estimate part poses and sizes at the category level, they often rely on geometric cues and complex multi-stage pipelines that first segment parts from the point cloud, followed by Normalized Part Coordinate Space (NPCS) estimation for 6D poses. These approaches overlook dense semantic cues from RGB images, leading to suboptimal accuracy, particularly for objects with small parts. To address these limitations, we propose a single-stage Network, CAP-Net, for estimating the 6D poses and sizes of Categorical Articulated Parts. This method combines RGB-D features to generate instance segmentation and NPCS representations for each part in an end-to-end manner. CAP-Net uses a unified network to simultaneously predict point-wise class labels, centroid offsets, and NPCS maps. A clustering algorithm then groups points of the same predicted class based on their estimated centroid distances to isolate each part. Finally, the NPCS region of each part is aligned with the point cloud to recover its final pose and size. To bridge the sim-to-real domain gap, we introduce the RGBD-Art dataset, the largest RGB-D articulated dataset to date, featuring photorealistic RGB images and depth noise simulated from real sensors. Experimental evaluations on the RGBD-Art dataset demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art approach. Real-world deployments of our model in robotic tasks underscore its robustness and exceptional sim-to-real transfer capabilities, confirming its substantial practical utility. Our dataset, code and pre-trained models are available on the project page.

GraspClutter6D: A Large-scale Real-world Dataset for Robust Perception and Grasping in Cluttered Scenes

Robust grasping in cluttered environments remains an open challenge in robotics. While benchmark datasets have significantly advanced deep learning methods, they mainly focus on simplistic scenes with light occlusion and insufficient diversity, limiting their applicability to practical scenarios. We present GraspClutter6D, a large-scale real-world grasping dataset featuring: (1) 1,000 highly cluttered scenes with dense arrangements (14.1 objects/scene, 62.6\% occlusion), (2) comprehensive coverage across 200 objects in 75 environment configurations (bins, shelves, and tables) captured using four RGB-D cameras from multiple viewpoints, and (3) rich annotations including 736K 6D object poses and 9.3B feasible robotic grasps for 52K RGB-D images. We benchmark state-of-the-art segmentation, object pose estimation, and grasping detection methods to provide key insights into challenges in cluttered environments. Additionally, we validate the dataset's effectiveness as a training resource, demonstrating that grasping networks trained on GraspClutter6D significantly outperform those trained on existing datasets in both simulation and real-world experiments. The dataset, toolkit, and annotation tools are publicly available on our project website: https://sites.google.com/view/graspclutter6d.

6DOPE-GS: Online 6D Object Pose Estimation using Gaussian Splatting

Efficient and accurate object pose estimation is an essential component for modern vision systems in many applications such as Augmented Reality, autonomous driving, and robotics. While research in model-based 6D object pose estimation has delivered promising results, model-free methods are hindered by the high computational load in rendering and inferring consistent poses of arbitrary objects in a live RGB-D video stream. To address this issue, we present 6DOPE-GS, a novel method for online 6D object pose estimation \& tracking with a single RGB-D camera by effectively leveraging advances in Gaussian Splatting. Thanks to the fast differentiable rendering capabilities of Gaussian Splatting, 6DOPE-GS can simultaneously optimize for 6D object poses and 3D object reconstruction. To achieve the necessary efficiency and accuracy for live tracking, our method uses incremental 2D Gaussian Splatting with an intelligent dynamic keyframe selection procedure to achieve high spatial object coverage and prevent erroneous pose updates. We also propose an opacity statistic-based pruning mechanism for adaptive Gaussian density control, to ensure training stability and efficiency. We evaluate our method on the HO3D and YCBInEOAT datasets and show that 6DOPE-GS matches the performance of state-of-the-art baselines for model-free simultaneous 6D pose tracking and reconstruction while providing a 5$\times$ speedup. We also demonstrate the method's suitability for live, dynamic object tracking and reconstruction in a real-world setting.

RDPN6D: Residual-based Dense Point-wise Network for 6Dof Object Pose Estimation Based on RGB-D Images

In this work, we introduce a novel method for calculating the 6DoF pose of an object using a single RGB-D image. Unlike existing methods that either directly predict objects' poses or rely on sparse keypoints for pose recovery, our approach addresses this challenging task using dense correspondence, i.e., we regress the object coordinates for each visible pixel. Our method leverages existing object detection methods. We incorporate a re-projection mechanism to adjust the camera's intrinsic matrix to accommodate cropping in RGB-D images. Moreover, we transform the 3D object coordinates into a residual representation, which can effectively reduce the output space and yield superior performance. We conducted extensive experiments to validate the efficacy of our approach for 6D pose estimation. Our approach outperforms most previous methods, especially in occlusion scenarios, and demonstrates notable improvements over the state-of-the-art methods. Our code is available on https://github.com/AI-Application-and-Integration-Lab/RDPN6D.

MatchU: Matching Unseen Objects for 6D Pose Estimation from RGB-D Images

Recent learning methods for object pose estimation require resource-intensive training for each individual object instance or category, hampering their scalability in real applications when confronted with previously unseen objects. In this paper, we propose MatchU, a Fuse-Describe-Match strategy for 6D pose estimation from RGB-D images. MatchU is a generic approach that fuses 2D texture and 3D geometric cues for 6D pose prediction of unseen objects. We rely on learning geometric 3D descriptors that are rotation-invariant by design. By encoding pose-agnostic geometry, the learned descriptors naturally generalize to unseen objects and capture symmetries. To tackle ambiguous associations using 3D geometry only, we fuse additional RGB information into our descriptor. This is achieved through a novel attention-based mechanism that fuses cross-modal information, together with a matching loss that leverages the latent space learned from RGB data to guide the descriptor learning process. Extensive experiments reveal the generalizability of both the RGB-D fusion strategy as well as the descriptor efficacy. Benefiting from the novel designs, MatchU surpasses all existing methods by a significant margin in terms of both accuracy and speed, even without the requirement of expensive re-training or rendering.

GenFlow: Generalizable Recurrent Flow for 6D Pose Refinement of Novel Objects

Despite the progress of learning-based methods for 6D object pose estimation, the trade-off between accuracy and scalability for novel objects still exists. Specifically, previous methods for novel objects do not make good use of the target object's 3D shape information since they focus on generalization by processing the shape indirectly, making them less effective. We present GenFlow, an approach that enables both accuracy and generalization to novel objects with the guidance of the target object's shape. Our method predicts optical flow between the rendered image and the observed image and refines the 6D pose iteratively. It boosts the performance by a constraint of the 3D shape and the generalizable geometric knowledge learned from an end-to-end differentiable system. We further improve our model by designing a cascade network architecture to exploit the multi-scale correlations and coarse-to-fine refinement. GenFlow ranked first on the unseen object pose estimation benchmarks in both the RGB and RGB-D cases. It also achieves performance competitive with existing state-of-the-art methods for the seen object pose estimation without any fine-tuning.