The work aims to design a method of material recognition and positioning based on machine vision, in order to improve the success rate of material grasping in the packaging process. A material recognition, positioning and grasping platform based on machine vision was built with the series manipulator arm as a carrier, including material transfer module, image acquisition module, visual sorting module, robot control module and grasping module. The related image processing algorithms were emphasized, including image prepossessing method based on bilateral filtering, Canny operator based image edge detection, image feature extraction and centroid location. Finally, an experimental study was carried out. The experimental results showed that, the correct recognition rate of material shape of the palletizing robot could reach 99.25% and the success rate of grasping could reach 99.5%. The method of shape recognition and grasping and positioning of materials can effectively solve the problems of image feature extraction and positioning, and has the characteristics of high recognition rate and accurate grasping, which can meet the requirements of packaging and handling.