Development of an omni-directional 3D camera for robot navigation

A novel structured light based omnidirectional 3D camera was developed, which consists of a projector, a camera, and two hyperbolic mirrors. Compared with traditional single-directional 3D sensors, such as kinect, the developed sensor could scan fully 360 degree in its surrounding without any blind area. A panoramic view was fused with dense 3D information could be provided to the operator. Furthermore, A single-shot surface coding method was also developed for such a sensor. Real-time 3D perception for moving objects could be achieved by the proposed coding method. Light rings embedded with different angular frequencies and intensities are emitted from the projector to environment through the hyperbolic mirror. Taking advantage of the epipolar constraints, the invariance of the phase angle is utilized to establish the correspondence and then trangulized to obtain depths information. Compared with existing omnidirectional 3D sensors, the proposed method remained real-time sensing and also obtained dense 3D samples. The proposed 3D camera has been implemented and the experimental results have been analyzed and discussed.