In this work, we present STOPNet, a framework for 6-DoF object suction detection on production lines, with a focus on but not limited to transparent objects, which is an important and challenging problem in robotic systems and modern industry. Current methods requiring depth input fail on transparent objects due to depth cameras’ deficiency in sensing their geometry, while we proposed a novel framework to reconstruct the scene on the production line depending only on RGB input, based on multiview stereo. Compared to existing works, our method not only reconstructs the whole 3D scene in order to obtain high-quality 6-DoF suction poses in real time but also generalizes to novel environments, novel arrangements and novel objects, including challenging transparent objects, both in simulation and the real world. Extensive experiments in simulation and the real world show that our method significantly surpasses the baselines and has better generalizability, which caters to practical industrial needs.

To support a collaborative environment and strengthen information management for the entire product lifecycles management (PLM) of products, there are increasing demands on developing new-generation product representations. The representations need to be of software platform independence, rapid sharing of information between geographically distributed applications and users, support of the entire product life cycle, and protection of commercial security of products. Conventional product representations, e.g., geometric or feature-based computer-aided design (CAD) models, are unable to meet such requirements. The extensible markup language (XML) offers several advantages, such as platform/application-independency, position-independency and machine-interpretability, so that it has the great potential to be incorporated with conventional product representations to form new-generation exchanging formats. This paper presents a survey of the XML-based product representations to support PLM.

Recently, research and development is being actively conducted to develop light-weight representation schemes for product models and visualization-based systems to support collaborative product development. In this paper, several mainstream light-weight representation schemes and visualization-based systems are surveyed. Meanwhile, technologies to integrate visualization-based systems with other functional systems to establish collaborative product development environments are discussed