A real-time 3D workspace modeling with stereo camera

This paper presents a novel approach to real-time 3D modeling of workspace for manipulative robotic tasks. First, we establish the three fundamental principles that human uses for modeling and interacting with environment. These principles have led to the development of an integrated approach to real-time 3D modeling, as follows: 1) It starts with a rapid but approximate characterization of the geometric configuration of workspace by identifying global plane features. 2) It quickly recognizes known objects in workspace and replaces them by their models in database based on in-situ registration. 3) It models the geometric details on the fly adaptively to the need of the given task based on a multi-resolution octree representation. SIFT features with their 3D position data, referred to here as stereo-sis SIFT, are used extensively, together with point clouds, for fast extraction of global plane features, for fast recognition of objects, for fast registration of scenes, as well as for overcoming incomplete and noisy nature of point clouds. The experimental results show the feasibility of real-time and behavior-oriented 3D modeling of workspace for robotic manipulative tasks.