Apparatus and method is disclosed for determining position of a robot relative to objects in a workspace which includes the use of a camera, scanner, or other suitable device in conjunction with object recognition. The camera, etc is used to receive information from which a point cloud can be developed about the scene that is viewed by the camera. The point cloud will be appreciated to be in a camera centric frame of reference. Information about a known datum is used and compared to the point cloud through object recognition. For example, a link from a robot could be the identified datum so that, when recognized, the coordinates of the point cloud can be converted to a robot centric frame of reference since the position of the datum would be known relative to the robot.