A fast 3D surface reconstruction method for spraying robot with time-of-flight camera

Abstract

In this paper a new fast 3D surface reconstruction method for spraying robot using TOF (time-of-flight) camera is proposed. The TOF camera can provide 3D points defined in the sensor coordination directly in real time. While fixed on the robot, the TOF camera position and orientation can be estimated and the 3D points can be translated to world coordinate system. An improved fast data acquiring and pre-processing method with TOF camera is proposed to get the point cloud accurately and quickly. In order to obtain 3D faces with given accuracy tolerance from scattered point cloud data rapidly, we present a fast grid building and face extracting algorithm based on flexible cubes. Region segmentation is also need to divide the model to several planes, which making the following path-planning of spraying robot easier. Finally experimental software called Quick RE with friendly man-machine interaction has been developed and the experiment results demonstrate the accuracy and robustness of the proposed algorithm in factory.