Robotics
Pose estimation
Definition
Pose estimation determines the position and orientation of an object or robot relative to a reference frame. For a rigid body in three-dimensional space, a full pose has three translational and three rotational degrees of freedom.
Updated
A position alone is not a pose
A robot reaching for a tool needs to know both where the tool is and how it is oriented. A rigid object's pose describes that combination. The reference frame matters: a pose relative to a camera must be transformed before a controller can use it in the robot's base frame.
NVIDIA's FoundationPose project provides a concrete example of six-dimensional object pose estimation and tracking from visual inputs. The six degrees describe spatial freedom; an implementation may store them using a matrix or a quaternion plus translation.
Estimation and tracking are different operations
Estimating pose can mean locating an object in a new observation. Tracking updates an existing estimate across observations. FoundationPose supports both, with documented setups based on an object CAD model or reference images.
Check the required object information
The project does not claim to infer every object's pose without prior information: its reported novel-object setup requires a CAD model or a small set of reference images. Compare methods under their actual input assumptions. In human-motion research, pose estimation can instead refer to body keypoints or joint arrangements, so specify whether the output is a rigid-object transform or an articulated skeleton.
Sources
Related terms
Rigid-body transformation
A rigid-body transformation changes a body's position and orientation without changing its shape or size. In three-dimensional robotics it consists of a proper rotation and a translation.
State estimation
State estimation infers quantities describing a robot or its environment from measurements and a model. A robot state may include position, orientation, velocity, and other variables that are not all directly measured.
Visual servoing
Visual servoing uses visual measurements inside a feedback loop to control robot motion. The controller updates movement to reduce an error defined from image features or visually estimated pose.