Uniform and complete surface coverage with a robot-mounted laser rangefinder

Describes a system for automatically digitizing the surfaces of a completely unknown object to a prescribed sampling density. Unlike many available commercial systems (e.g. Cyberware), our system analyzes actively the data and computes sensor trajectories to achieve complete surface coverage taking into account the limitations of the sensor/manipulator. This represents in fact an active approach to the problem of complete object digitization, working directly at the measurement level, as opposed to existing off-line methods that perform post-processing on a fixed data set. We propose a theoretical framework to achieve this goal and we present preliminary results of a laboratory implementation.