Material handling equipment, pallet detection method, and controller

A pallet detection method, comprising:

• performing layered slicing on a target point cloud along a first direction, to obtain a sliced point-cloud set, wherein the sliced point-cloud set comprises point clouds of a plurality of slices;
• clustering the point clouds in the sliced point-cloud set, to determine a set of fork pockets and block faces;
• matching the set of the fork pockets and the block faces with a set of target beam information to obtain a target pallet;
• calculating, based on a point cloud of the target pallet, a pose of the target pallet;
• and
• controlling, based on the pose of the target pallet, the material handling equipment to handle the target pallet;
• wherein a quantity of the target pallet is greater than one, and the calculating, based on the point cloud of the target pallet, the pose of the target pallet, comprises:
• determining, based on point clouds of a plurality of target pallets, poses of the plurality of target pallets, when the plurality of target pallets meet a first constraint condition;
• wherein the first constraint condition comprises at least one of the following:
• a width difference between each two adjacent target pallets falls within a target width-difference range;
• a spacing between each two adjacent target pallets falls within a target spacing range;
• and
• pallet ID codes of the plurality of target pallets are the same.

A controller, comprising:

• a processor;
• a memory, configured to store program instructions executable by the processor;
• wherein the processor is configured to execute program instructions to implement the following steps:
• performing layered slicing on a target point cloud along a first direction, to obtain a sliced point-cloud set, wherein the sliced point-cloud set comprises point clouds of a plurality of slices;
• clustering the point clouds in the sliced point-cloud set, to determine a set of fork pockets and block faces;
• matching the set of the fork pockets and the block faces with a set of target beam information to obtain a target pallet;
• calculating, based on a point cloud of the target pallet, a pose of the target pallet;
• and
• controlling, based on the pose of the target pallet, the material handling equipment to handle the target pallet;
• wherein a quantity of the target pallet is greater than one, and the calculating, based on the point cloud of the target pallet, the pose of the target pallet, comprises:
• determining, based on point clouds of a plurality of target pallets, poses of the plurality of target pallets, when the plurality of target pallets meet a first constraint condition;
• wherein the first constraint condition comprises at least one of the following:
• a width difference between each two adjacent target pallets falls within a target width-difference range;
• a spacing between each two adjacent target pallets falls within a target spacing range;
• and
• pallet ID codes of the plurality of target pallets are the same.