1. A system for determining alignment of an object in three dimensional space (3D) comprising: one or more 3D sensors and one or more processing elements constructed and arranged to generate a 3D representation of a scene; a feature extraction process that generates found 3D higher level geometric shapes (HLGS) of the scene from the 3D representation; and a correspondence process that compares the found 3D HLGS to a model 3D HLGS to generate one or more candidate 3D poses of one or more objects in the scene, the correspondence process being constructed and arranged to score the plurality of candidate 3D poses and select at least one high-scoring pose based upon a sufficiently high score.