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Pose estimation is a basic module in many robot manipulation pipelines. Estimating the pose of objects in the environment can be useful for grasping, motion planning, or manipulation. However, current state-of-the-art methods for pose estimation either rely on large annotated training sets or simulated data. Further, the long training times for these methods prohibit quick interaction with novel objects. To address these issues, we introduce a novel method for zero-shot object pose estimation in clutter. Our approach uses a hypothesis generation and scoring framework, with a focus on learning a scoring function that generalizes to objects not used for training. We achieve zero-shot generalization by rating hypotheses as a function of unordered point differences. We evaluate our method on challenging datasets with both textured and untextured objects in cluttered scenes and demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms previous methods on this task. We also demonstrate how our system can be used by quickly scanning and building a model of a novel object, which can immediately be used by our method for pose estimation. Our work allows users to estimate the pose of novel objects without requiring any retraining. 

For robots to operate robustly in the real world, they should be aware of their uncertainty. However, most methods for object pose estimation return a single point estimate of the object’s pose. In this work, we propose two learned methods for estimating a distribution over an object’s orientation. Our methods take into account both the inaccuracies in the pose estimation as well as the object symmetries. Our first method, which regresses from deep learned features to an isotropic Bingham distribution, gives the best performance for orientation distribution estimation for non-symmetric objects. Our second method learns to compare deep features and generates a non-parametric histogram distribution. This method gives the best performance on objects with unknown symmetries, accurately modeling both symmetric and non-symmetric objects, without any requirement of symmetry annotation. We show that both of these methods can be used to augment an existing pose estimator. Our evaluation compares our methods to a large number of baseline approaches for uncertainty estimation across a variety of different types of objects. Code available at https://bokorn.github.io/orientation-distributions/