Measuring the distance and orientation of a planar surface using nonstructured lighting-3-D measurement system for indoor mobile robots

This paper describes a novel method for measuring the distances to planar surfaces and their orientations. The measurement system consists of a TV camera and two ordinary lamps. The lamps are switched on alternately, and images under each lighting condition are taken. If the two light sources are arranged at appropriate positions with respect to the camera, the peak positions in the two images directly give the surface orientation and the perpendicular distance to the plane. By measuring the two peak positions, this method promises to speed up the acquisition of geometrical information on an entire scene considerably because the distance and orientation can be obtained without analyzing range maps. Since the equipment setup is very simple, the proposed technique will be useful, for example, for real-world robotic applications such as navigation of indoor mobile robots. The experimental results on the error of measurement show that the method is sufficient for such purposes.