Mobile robots for digitalization of environements

Digital 3D models of the environment are needed in rescue and inspection robotics, facility managements and architecture.
This video presents an automatic system for gaging and digitalization of 3D indoor environments. It consists of an autonomous
mobile robot (KURT3D / Ariadne), a reliable 3D laser range finder and three elaborated software modules. The first module, a fast variant of the
Iterative Closest Points algorithm, registers the 3D scans in a common coordinate system and relocalizes the robot. The
second module, a next best view planner, computes the next nominal pose based on the acquired 3D data while avoiding
complicated obstacles. The third module, a closed-loop and globally stable motor controller, navigates the mobile robot to
a nominal pose on the base of odometry and avoids collisions with dynamical obstacles. The 3D laser range finder acquires
a 3D scan at this pose. The proposed method allows one to digitalize large indoor environments fast and reliably without
any intervention and solves the SLAM problem. The results of two 3D digitalization experiments are presented using a fast
octree-based visualization method.
Author: Andreas Nuechter, Hartmut Surmann, Kai Pervoelz, Kai Lingemann, Joachim Hertzberg

Duration : 0:4:11