ABSTRACT The rapid development of industry intelligence has promoted the importance of sorting robots, but the shortcomings of sorting tasks are also gradually obvious. The target detection of the sorting robot in the process of sorting and grasping is affected by the anchor frame setting, and its grasping efficiency and recognition effect are low. Therefore, a detection network based on an anchor frame-free regression algorithm is proposed in this study, and a positioning and grasping method of the sorting robot based on the Deep Belief Network (DBN) algorithm is proposed. The algorithm experiment shows that the prediction accuracy of the proposed anchor-free detection network in the PASCAL VOC dataset reaches 92.91, significantly higher than that of other detection networks. In addition, the sorting robot was researched and designed with high accuracy in occlusion target recognition. When the occlusion area reaches 70%, the accuracy rate is as high as 81.26%, which is far higher than other detection schemes. The above results show that in improving the sorting robot’s target recognition ability, the anchor-free detection network can significantly improve its recognition accuracy. At the same time, introducing the DBN network can improve the robot’s recognition ability for occluded targets, which is of great significance to the development of the sorting robot and the intelligent industry.