HSV Color-Space-Based Automated Object Localization for Robot Grasping without Prior Knowledge

We propose a simple and robust HSV color-space-based algorithm that can automatically extract object position information without human intervention or prior knowledge. In manufacturing sites with high variability, it is difficult to recognize products through robot machine vision, especially in terms of extracting object information accurately, owing to various environmental factors such as the noise around objects, shadows, light reflections, and illumination interferences. The proposed algorithm, which does not require users to reset the HSV color threshold value whenever a product is changed, uses ROI referencing method to solve this problem. The algorithm automatically identifies the object’s location by using the HSV color-space-based ROI random sampling, ROI similarity comparison, and ROI merging. The proposed system utilizes an IoT device with several modules for the detection, analysis, control, and management of object data. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is very useful for industrial automation applications under complex and highly variable manufacturing environments.