View planning for 3D object reconstruction with a mobile manipulator robot

The task addressed in this paper is to plan iteratively a set views in order to reconstruct an object using a mobile manipulator robot with an “eye-in-hand” sensor. The proposed method plans views directly in the configuration space avoiding the need of inverse kinematics. It is based on a fast evaluation and rejection of a set of candidate configurations. The main contributions are: a utility function to rank the views and an evaluation strategy implemented as a series of filters. Given that the candidate views are configurations, motion planning is solved using a rapidly-exploring random tree. The system is experimentally evaluated in simulation, contrasting it with previous work. We also present experiments with a real mobile manipulator robot, demonstrating the effectiveness of our method.