A 3-D Scanner Capturing Range and Color for the Robotics Applications

In mobile robotics, the ability to acquire three-dimensional information from an environment and to have color information about surrounding objects makes the robot vision system more suitable for complex tasks such as environment modeling. We present a simple 3-D color-range scanner CRS, which is able to capture the geometry and color of the measured object. The CRS utilizes a scanning laser sheet and the triangulation principle to acquire the geometry of the measured object. The projected laser stripe is detected using a matrix array pixel processor MAPP2200, which makes the scanner system compact and eliminates the need for any additional signal processing hardware. The color values for each 3-D point are acquired using a standard color CCD camera. For accurate range measurements and color value acquisition the physical geometry of the scanning system has to be determined and camera-to-camera calibration made between MAPP2200 and CCD camera. In-house camera calibration toolbox for MATLAB is used for both of these tasks. To maximize portability the CRS is connected to the RS-232 port of the host computer and can be easily controlled by using simple ASCII commands. Among other sensors CRS is a part of our distributed robotics architecture and it can be controlled using CORBA interface, which makes its usage effortless in various applications.