Perception for Coupler Rod of Freight Train Based on Image and Point Clouds

In the construction of automated marshaling yards, the automatic uncoupling operation of freight trains has always been the research and development direction. The coupler rod is the operation object of the uncoupling operation. The identification of coupler rod type and estimating position and posture are the prerequisites to realizing automatic uncoupling operation. In this paper, we propose a perception method of coupler rod by RGB image combined with the point cloud. We use an RGBD camera to synchronously collect frame-aligned RGB and depth images and generate point cloud data with colors according to the mapping relationship. Then, we use the YOLOv5 neural network to detect the collected RGB images and recognize the type of coupler rod in the image. Clear clutter in the point cloud and the bounding box is mapped to a spatial coordinate system for straight-through filtering of the point cloud. We use RANSAC for coarse registration and ICP for fine registration. The result of registration is carried out with the lower sampling point cloud model to achieve the registration of the coupler rod. Experiments show that this method can effectively segment the point cloud of the region of interest with high robustness.