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."

Comments

One practical use...

[cjpez]

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!

Re:Out of curiousity...

[merlin_jim]

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.

well, it's like the difference between what the public perceives a dictionary as, and what a dictionary actually is.

For instance, when I was a senior in high school, Webster's started including the word ain't. Now some teachers were very upset by it while others were ecstatic.

Then my english teacher put it in perspective.

Many people belive that dictionaries define a language. They do not. They describe a language.

Same thing here. Sure you could model a building by hand, but what you get is a definition of an ideal building. Whereas 3-D laser scanning describes the building as it is, very precisely.

Real world examples where this is a good thing?

Well recently they did some 3-D scans of stonehenge. The scan data was precise enough to show markings on many stones that had never been seen before (too shallow / worn)

Or imagine a world of the future based on some form of 3d on-demand printing that's cheaper and stronger than traditional fabrication. We already have that in certain fields, BTW... it's quickly growing to be universal. You have a 3D laser system that precisely measures an existing building, and then a printer that prints new structures to be joined to the building instantly, automatically precisely sized and positioned.