A foveal 3D laser scanner integrating texture into range data

In the meantime the acquisition of dense point clouds or triangulated surface data with 3D laser range scanners is in the meantime a widely discussed topic. Especially in the areas of world modelling or autonomous navigation reliable 3D data is necessary. Mobile systems applications like collision avoidance or simultaneous localisation and mapping (SLAM) require high data rates, dense point clouds, constant availability of data and exact single scans. Commercial 3D laser scanner are mostly expensive, not mobile, too slow or not exact enough. We present in this article a 3D laser range scanner which is based on a commercial 2D scanner with a movable origin. In contrast to other "self-build" 3D scanners our scanner reaches high data density in heading direction and lower density at the boundaries (foveal vision), which is important for autonomous navigation.