High-precision three-dimensional laser measurement system by cooperative multiple mobile robots

This paper presents a high-precision three-dimensional laser measurement system of an architectural structure by cooperative multiple mobile robots. This system is composed of three mobile robots, that is, a parent robot and two child robots. The parent robot is equipped with a three-dimensional laser scanner, attitude sensor, total station, and auto-leveling device. On the other hand, the child robots are equipped with six corner mirrors. The parent robot moves and stops repeatedly, and measures a three-dimensional architectural shape using the equipped laser scanner at several positions. Meanwhile, the child robots also move and stop alternately, and act as mobile landmarks for the positioning of the parent robot. By replacing or newly installing several devices/mechanisms, the precision of the proposed system becomes incomparably higher than our previous system. We report the system achieves quite high accuracy of 0.03 0.05% of targets' size through indoor/outdoor experiments. We apply the proposed technique for the shape measurement system of tunnels under construction and verify that the accuracy of the developed system is as high as a conventional ground-fixed laser scanner.

[1]  Wolfram Burgard,et al.  Autonomous exploration and mapping of abandoned mines , 2004, IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine.

[2]  Paul Newman,et al.  Using laser range data for 3D SLAM in outdoor environments , 2006, Proceedings 2006 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2006. ICRA 2006..

[3]  Atsushi Nakazawa,et al.  Bayon Digital Archival Project , 2004 .

[4]  Edwin Olson,et al.  Fast iterative alignment of pose graphs with poor initial estimates , 2006, Proceedings 2006 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2006. ICRA 2006..

[5]  Ryo Kurazume,et al.  Laser-based geometric modeling using cooperative multiple mobile robots , 2009, 2009 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[6]  Jun-ichi Takiguchi,et al.  Tunnel Cross-Section Measurement System Using a Mobile Mapping System , 2009, J. Robotics Mechatronics.

[7]  E. Olson Fast iterative alignment of pose graphs with poor estimates , 2006 .

[8]  Mark S. Diederichs,et al.  Geotechnical and operational applications for 3-dimensional laser scanning in drill and blast tunnels , 2010 .

[9]  Wolfram Burgard,et al.  Improved Techniques for Grid Mapping With Rao-Blackwellized Particle Filters , 2007, IEEE Transactions on Robotics.

[10]  M. J. Henriques,et al.  Uncertainty in tacheometric measurement of convergences in tunnels , 2006 .

[11]  Cyrill Stachniss,et al.  On measuring the accuracy of SLAM algorithms , 2009, Auton. Robots.

[12]  Sebastian Thrun,et al.  6D SLAM with an application in autonomous mine mapping , 2004, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2004. Proceedings. ICRA '04. 2004.

[13]  Marc Levoy,et al.  The digital Michelangelo project: 3D scanning of large statues , 2000, SIGGRAPH.

[14]  Hans De Backer,et al.  High resolution terrestrial laser scanning for tunnel deformation measurements , 2010 .

[15]  Ryo Kurazume,et al.  Cooperative positioning with multiple robots , 1994, Proceedings of the 1994 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[16]  Ryo Kurazume,et al.  3D laser measurement system for large scale architectures using multiple mobile robots , 2007, Sixth International Conference on 3-D Digital Imaging and Modeling (3DIM 2007).

[17]  Roland Siegwart,et al.  EKF-based 3D SLAM for structured environment reconstruction , 2005, 2005 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[18]  Myung Sagong,et al.  Feature extraction of a concrete tunnel liner from 3D laser scanning data , 2009 .