Aiming at the problem that the monocular vision system is difficult to adapt to changes of workpiece Z-axis position in industry, a Z-axis position adaptive recognition and location system based on monocular vision was developed. The principle of laser triangulation ranging was used to detect the distance between the workpiece coordinate system plane and the camera coordinate system plane, and cooperated with the lower computer control system, the Z-axis position adaptation of the workpiece platform was realized. Furthermore, the improved template matching algorithm which combined with HSV color space model was used to recognize and locate the workpiece. By combining Halcon with Visual Studio, the software was developed and the experiments were carried out to recognize and locate the workpiece. The experimental results show that the average positioning error of the system is less than 1 mm in the working range,and has good Z-axis position adaptive adjustment ability and high positioning accuracy.