PoseFusion: Multi-Scale Keypoint Correspondence for Monocular Camera-to-Robot Pose Estimation in Robotic Manipulation

Visual-based robot pose estimation is a fundamental challenge, involving the determination of the camera’s pose with respect to a robot. Conventional methods for camera-to-robot pose calibration rely on fiducial markers to establish keypoint correspondences. However, these approaches exhibit significant variability in accuracy and robustness, particularly in 2D keypoint detection. In this work, we present an end-to-end pose estimation approach that achieves camera-to-robot calibration using monocular images and keypoint information. Our method employs a two-level nested U-shaped architecture, featuring a bottom-level residual U-block to extract richer contextual information from diverse receptive fields to enhance keypoint refinement. By incorporating the perspective-n-point (PnP) algorithm and leveraging 3D robot joint keypoints, we establish correspondence of 3D coordinate points between the robot’s coordinate system and the camera’s coordinate system, facilitating accurate pose estimation. Experimental evaluations encompass real-world and synthetic datasets, demonstrating competitive results across three distinct robot manipulators.