Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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.
Err.
Well, the stated purpose of this thing says nothing about it being used outdoors or to model large-scale terrain features. I mean, that's implicit in its design. This thing is designed to reproduce controlled environments.
And I don't know why you would think that is limiting! Maybe if you're thinking from the standpoint of a modeller/animator. Or maybe you just read the headline, and said 'omg it si small it cannot model WORLD omgomgomg'.
I see a couple of truly kickass uses for this thing. The first is adding texturing ability (you'd probably have to get dozens and dozens of scans, and have some good algorithms, to come up with good and relatively complete texturing, but I gotta' think that would be trivial compared to the sorts of problems they've already solved in making this thing -- and you wouldn't have to recreate the mesh each time, just sync up the coordinates with the one already created.
Ok, the use I see:
Crime scenes.
Bring in, hell, let's say 20 of these. Maybe some of them would be able to raise themselves up (heh, little accordioning platform for the recording mechanism, right out of the cartoons). They would roll around, sense out the room, figure out optimal placements, and then they would all scan the room, creating a near-perfect model of the room, perhaps mere hours of minutes after a crime has taken place. The cops would seal off the room, and the recorders would laboriusly record and texture everything about the room, down to the finest details.
Sure, it wouldn't catch a fingerprint or a peice of hair, and the plane/shape detection that is done actually removes some of the captured information (also removes some 'noise', but the forensic work they'd probably prefer a little noise to averaging out potentially important information) -- but the bottom line is, there wouldn't be a need for crime scene 'reconstruction', from photographs and little sketches and things that come after the fact. This would be absolutely accurate, more accurate than subjective information relayed secondhand from paid expert testimony. "How close would you say they were probably standing, from this photograph of bloodstains?"
So just in forensics alone, I see massive potential.