Forklift Cargo Measurement

A two-second RGB-D cargo-dimension measurement unit for Hangcha Group.

Independently designed, implemented, calibrated, and delivered a single-camera 3D cargo-measurement unit for Hangcha Group. The system estimates length, width, height, and volume from a RealSense D435i within two seconds.

Pipeline

  • Align color and depth frames and generate an Open3D point cloud
  • Transform measurements into the world coordinate system through camera-height and tilt calibration
  • Apply voxel downsampling and 3D ROI cropping to remove the floor and background
  • Extract the cargo top plane with RANSAC and remove boundary outliers statistically
  • Project the top plane to XY and use OpenCV minAreaRect for length and width; use world-frame Z for height
  • Fuse eight valid measurements using the median to suppress depth noise and occasional plane-selection errors

Outcome

The system supports cargo from small boxes to pallet-scale loads, produces stable measurements in approximately 1.5-2 seconds, and passed the client’s first-phase acceptance on the first attempt.

Technologies: RealSense D435i, Python, Open3D, OpenCV, RANSAC, point-cloud processing