A German team from Fraunhofer AIS has coupled a fast autonomous robot with a 3D laser scanner to digitize the environment. The team reports about their work in this article, one of fifteen on the subject of machine perception published by ERCIM News.
Kurt3D is an autonomous mobile robot equipped with a reliable and precise 3D laser scanner that digitalizes environments. High quality geometric 3D maps with semantic information are automatically generated after the exploration by the robot.
Before going any further, let's start with pictures. Here is a photograph of Kurt2, a fast moving autonomous mobile robot that drives with 4.0 m/s (14.4 km/h) (Credit: Dieter Klein).
Now, here is another robot, equipped with the AIS 3D laser range finder on the top (Credit: Fraunhofer AIS).
Finally, here is Kurt3D mapping a construction site (Credit: Fraunhofer AIS).
The team developed a four-step method to generate 3D models with this robot.
- First we use an autonomous mobile robot for gaging in 3D the environment.
- Second we extract features, ie, planes from registered unmeshed range data.
- Third the computed planes are labeled based on their relative orientation.
- Fourth we have implemented a knowledge based approach for the automatic model refinement. The merging of the views as well as the scanning process itself produces noisy data.
Please read the full article for more details about the method and the results obtained by using the robot.
Source: Hartmut Surmann, Andreas Nuechter, Kai Lingemann and Joachim Hertzberg, in ERCIM News No.55, October 2003
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