An efficient planning method for mobile robot based 3D digitization

Three dimensional digitization of an object is very important to many robotic applications. This paper introduces an efficient planning method for robotic 3D digitization. First, the scanning image in one viewpoint is separated into small cubes using the Octree method. Second, a least-square method is applied for normal vector calculation in each cube. Third, the distribution of surface normal vectors is analyzed to evaluate whether the surface contains sufficient constraints for the ICP-based scanning image registration. Based on this efficient surface constraint analysis, our method tries to find out the minimum overlapping area between two consecutive scanning images, which guarantees that the next scanning image can be merged to the previous one properly. This method is implemented on a low-cost mobile robot—iRobot.