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A Mobile Robot For Modeling The World In 3D
Roland Piquepaille writes "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." This overview tells you more about the four-step method used to generate 3D models with this robot and contains several pictures of Kurt3D and its 3D laser."
I have a client who's willing to pay one meelion dollars to the man who makes this robot look like a shark...
How does this thing figure out distances? Does it time the return of the laser reflections?
I also can't help wondering how it models the tops of things - it looks like it's fairly squat.
What's the advantage of a robot like this versus describing every object by hand, as 3d animators do (typically in some kind of interpreted language).
It seems like writing "there's a sphere of radius 3 centered here" would take less time than waiting for the robot to scan it.
I think this robot could have many practical applications in the field of mapping out office buildings for inclusion in FPS games. Frag your coworkers!
Al Qaeda has ninjas!
From the article: "Precise digital 3D models of indoor environments are needed in several applications, eg, facility management, architecture, rescue and inspection robotics."
This made me chuckle, to think we'd be getting replacements for management, in the form of cute robots that can't talk.
I'm waiting for a robot I can fight martial arts with. Any chance of us getting one of those?
It's nice to hear things about stuff like Kurt3D. I remember when I used to think R2-D2 would be hela cool to have around as a buddy.
He could tweet and chirp away while I explained that moisture vaporators are not the same as carbon units.
Man, as if it's bad enough for builders that some architect can come around and harass you for being 1 inch off with a divider wall, now the architect will just send the robot down to measure out the entire building in 3d and point out any screwups!
can you say UT map?
seriously, i would love to go around my office/university/town with a chaingun and have a little fire fight...
I, for one, do NOT welcome our human form replicated robot overlords. Who's with me? John and Sarah Conner? That makes three. Who else?
I for one welcome my new kurt3D overlord!
Down, down, down. The Red knight's goin' down.
Great article (hope it doesn't get /.'d). While they seem to be working on large-scale room features (wall, door, floor, ceiling), I can see the next step being an autonomous robot that can find and identify such basics as a light switch and a power (mains) outlet.
I remember years and years ago, a robot had been developed that could optically recognize a power outlet and plug itself in... but I don't think it did much else. This would have been early 80s, probably, so we're talking Z-80 vs. Pentium.
Future recognition goals:
* Refrigerator door (fetch beer, please)
* Small child (danger! sticky fingers! run away!)
* Other robots for romantic interludes:
(IF Query(Other_Bot, EXCHANGE_CODE) == TRUE Extend_Programming_Probe(Other_Bot))
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
14 posts and already slashdotted.
Kurt3d scanning for webserver . . . none found.
Finding group of burly men to fuck content-hungry Slashdot readers in the ass . . . found.
Fucking . . .
I tried to get Kurt3D to create a laser scan of the Hall of Mirrors in my glass house, and the resulting mesh was almost complete gibberish.
Also, I am now blind.
It looks barely mobile. The greatest problem is that it is wheeled, which instantly reduces its versatility. Even worse, the wheels are very small and the undercarriage nearly scrapes the ground. If the goal is-- as the headline claims-- to model the world, you'd think they would want a land-based platform capable of either navigating extreme terrain, or an aerial platform that could ignore navigational problems posed by arduous terrain (e.g., a sattelite, airplane, or dirigible).
As is, it is limited to extremely controlled 3D environments. Perfect for mapping a room, but not much more. However, it occurs to me that this technology may be the atavistic precursor to 3D video cameras.
I would think extracting 3D from video footage would be better. This thing can only map places where it can ride. Digital video cameras are pretty decent nowadays. I have seen university projects that say they have gotten pretty decent detection rates from video, but never seen any code nor binary :-/
If I install a fleshlight in an inflatable female zebra, does that make it a robot?
pr0n.
I always thought it would be an interesting way to assemble 3D gaming worlds. A lot of people have done this by hand, like old DOOM or Quake maps modeled on their school or what not. I guess it should be gathering "polygon texture" data too in that case
Of course, most buildings are pretty boring relative to the game-specific layouts, but hey. It would be a good quick start.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
Seems pretty cool, I think what really sets this apart is the possibility of accuracy that couldn't be easily derived from an on site visit or from video. You can get some very fine grained messurements with this osrt of idea. It seems to me that once they get this thing refined down to a small enough size is method of ploting its currently location is rather condusive the being able to fly around. That would solve some people's concerns about mapping the tops of surfaces.
Just power this thing up, let it cruise around for a bit and you've got an high detail map of an environment. I like it.
you'll see that it has to be a frickin' laser on the head of a frickin' shark.
Laser rays are not reflected by mirrors because they operate on a different wavelengths.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
The Franhofer Institute has been doing some nice work with MEMS mirrors, and I was expecting something new from them.
There's a very nice true 3D solid state rangefinder out of Switzerland, but it's a continuous beam device and thus very limited in range. Works fine indoors, though.
Imaging laser rangefinder technology is lousy, because product volume is so low. Five companies have exited the field in the last decade. There are several mechanical scanners available, all using scanning technologies abandoned by television in the 1940s. All-electronic solutions have been developed as prototypes, but they're not shipping yet.
Once this problem is cracked, mobile robotics is going to get much better.
Lasers are not reflected by mirrors, eh?
;)
Wait. How do we make lasers again? My memory is a little fuzzy.
SCO Response: Sign this NDA plz. We will explain all if u do. No need to read the 'Soul Transfer' subheading . . . err, legal jargon, you understand . . .
...to welcome our newly autonomous Robot Masters in their next step in the evolution to reigning supreme on this planet.
The Matrix and The The Terminator series are just stories for entertainment, my Metal Lords, we do not see it them an inspiration or blueprints for self preservation.
I apologize for my fellow fleshlings' urge to make mundane use of you to create maps for our bloodsport. They know not their folly. I beg to to have mercy on them in your Brutally Controlled Future Earth.
ROBOTS RULE! HUMANS DROOL!
s'wut i sed.
I'm guessing its pretty loud but I have to imagine these things could be deployed from a Predator in volume and quickly get a good picture of the interior of a compound/cave/stronghold before they were destroyed by an enemy.
You might know everything, but you certainly don't know everybody...
What if the site is the Moon? Or Mars?
This kind of sounds dumb... But why don't airplane simulation companies do this with the earth and combind it with a highly detailed pictures of the earth to construct the ultimat map?
What's so bad about being lazy? What if there was a war and nobody showed up?
NOAA has already mapped topography and bathymetry.
http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/seg/topo/globe.shtml
Later,
jason
and better.. Carnegie Mellon put one of those 3D laser scanners on a small, unmanned helicopter here http://www.ri.cmu.edu/pub_files/pub1/miller_james_ ryan_1998_1/miller_james_ryan_1998_1.pdf
way back in 1998
From the same material that vampires are made of.
"Stop failing the Turing test!" -- Dilbert
Just one more step towards Google indexing the real world so I can finally find where my TV remote got to...
I had a similar idea a while back of using 2 cameras aligned side by side. each with a servo motor to give it 20 degrees of freedom either way. By taking a snapshot of both images, you could use motion detection routines (i.e same ones used to encode mpeg)to see how far the images differ from each other and move the camera's angles until the 2 images virtually parallel each other. Then, taking the angles of the cameras, a simple triangulation calculation would tell approximately how far an object is to the camera. A passive range finder if you will. The advantages of using 2 pictures is that you would do a lot of easy image processing routines to figure out the walls and ceilings without having to work with just a cloud of points. I called my invention.. "2 cameras on a stick". Alas I didn't have the funding to pursue the idea further.
The AVENUE Project at Columbia University had an earlier implementation for modeling urban sites.
Also check out The MIT City Scanning Project.
Please don't tell my cat this, she will get very depressed that she can no longer chase the lasers I bounce off all the mirrors in our home for her. As of course a laser contains no light, so operates outside the light spectrum. Never minding that infared can be both reflected and refracted as well, withness the door chime sensors using a mirrored reflector to return the beam from emitter to detector. Or the old trick of using your mirror to turn on the roommate's TV.
But of course, you are in mensa, so I am certain all this occured to you already.
You can have it fast, accurate, or pretty. Pick any 2.
There's the Centibots stuff at SRI:
http://www.ai.sri.com/centibots/
which also uses LADAR-bots.
In defense, there's a lot of interest in LADAR as well, because with an actual 3D image of the target area you can do autonomous target recognition and acquisition off something like a UAV. I think most LADARs right now are raster scan (i.e., one beam that sweeps left to right and then down, like a TV), but I've seen that people are working on flash LADAR (one big "pop" like a flashbulb and then all the info comes back at once).
It's all very cool, I gotta say.
...Now give the dang thing a vacuum cleaner so it can clean under the coffee table.
Useful in dangerous environments.
For example, after 9/11, engineers had a hell of a time figuring out the situation below ground level at the World Trade Center site -- people got hurt exploring down there. Far better to send in a robot.
Granted, this version of the robot isn't sufficiently capable, but future versions might well be.
-kgj
RedZone Robotics and Carnegie Mellon had this years ago on their Pioneer robot which did structural analysis at Chernobyl. It was deployed in the summer of 1999, though I think the build was complete by the start of 1999.
I was told the 3D Mapper was from SGI, but I have a feeling they provided the computers, not the mapping technology. Also, the resulting 3D environment could be explored via a VR helmet and gloves. Pretty slick stuff, I have video of it somewhere.
Similar technology has been used for years in the Engineering/Architectural profession, but it is mounted on a hand truck which is moved around by a survey team. Very useful, sometimes very expensive. The problem is it yields a massive "data cloud". Interpreting what that data means and converting it to models and drawings humans can use requires, yep, you guessed it-human interpretation.
Only a marketing weenie would use the
Term "Digitalize".
Time to put Digitalize on the Bullshit Bingo list..
So this means we can buy a few thousand, dispatch them all over the planet, and build our own Matrix?
Sorry, my karma just ran over your dogma.
At my old uni they had a very similar project doing 3D laser scans of building and meshing them with the visible pictures. Have a look at Resolve Project.
There are four sorts of people in the world: fools, lunatics, idiots and morons. - Umberto Eco, Foucaut's pendulum.
It seems that most of us have missed the importance of this robot. I was fortunate enough to see the research group present for this and another of their robots (which does the same thing but is large enough to carry a substantial cargo as well). This robot autonomously digitizes large enviorments including texture maps on it. While admittidly there is room for improvement it is more than just an important step. It could be snuck up into all sorts of places people can't fit and be used to search through rubble, or be used to search through spaces in the pyramids too small for people to fit through. Similar technology could be used in space probes sent to places like mars to digitize the enviorment where human control over them takes an extremely long time, or on the bottom of the ocean giving us an image of it we didnt otherwise have. While similar robots have existed this one pans the time of flight laser scanner in order to digitize the entire room, and while it doesnt do it super quickly I saw a video of it working and it does work fairly fast. It should be able to digitize a decent size room in 3 or 4 minutes fairly completely.
MP3Ds anyone?
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
those lasers are way better than the flat ones.
...It's a good start. Now they just need to upp the wattage on the laser, implant an 'evil emotions' chip, and the domination of the earth by our robot overlords can begin.