In this work we present a method to detect and estimate the three-dimensional pose of planar and textureless objects placed randomly on a conveyor belt or inside a bin. The method is based on analysis of single 2D images acquired by a standard camera. The algorithm exploits a template matching method to recognize the objects. A set of pose hypotheses are then refined and, based on a gradient orientation scoring, the best object to be manipulated is selected. The method is flexible and can be used with different objects without changing parameters since it exploits a CAD model as input for template generation. We validated the method using synthetic images. An experimental setup has been also designed using a fixed standard camera to localize planar metal objects in various scenarios
