Automated 3D scenes reconstruction for mobile robots using laser scanning

The fast reconstruction for 3D environment is a challenging work for autonomous mobile robots. This paper presents an automated 3D scenes reconstruction method based on ICP algorithm. According to the order relations of 3D laser scanning, an effective edge feature extraction method is proposed to extract the edge points in the 3D scenes. The edge points instead of the initial points are used in pairs matching in the course of ICP registration, which can reduce the computational burden significantly. A 3D-grid-division method is adopted to reduce the redundant data points in the overlapping areas of multiple scans. The data points are distributed into small voxels and the point nearest to the center is extracted to reconstruct a new scene. According to the reduced points in the reconstructed scene, digitalization of 3D environment is implemented by using 3D grids and surface meshes. A series of experiment results and data analysis show the method's validity and practicability.