In this paper we present an object detection method that uses edge categorisation in combination with a local multi-modal histogram descriptor, all based on RGB-D data. Our target application is robust detection and pose estimation of known objects. We propose to apply a recently introduced edge categorisation algorithm for describing objects in terms of its different edge types. Relying on edge information allow our system to deal with objects with little or no texture or surface variation. We show that edge categorisation improves matching performance due to the higher level of discrimination, which is made possible by the explicit use of edge categories in the feature descriptor. We quantitatively compare our approach with the state-of-the-art template based Linemod method, which also provides an effective way of dealing with texture-less objects, tests were performed on our own object dataset. Our results show that detection based on edge local multi-modal histogram descriptor outperforms Linemod with a significantly smaller amount of templates.