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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!
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?
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.
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.
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 :-/
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.
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.
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.
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.
They already did the scanning. Now the only need to match it with pictures which I'm sure are available as well.
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/srtm/
"Be careful or be roadkill" - Calvin
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.
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.
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.