Acquisition of Tactile Information from Point Cloud

Abstract

In this paper, we propose an algorithm to obtain the tactile information of road surface through point cloud data. From the 3D point cloud collected through the LiDAR sensor, three-dimensional spatial coordinate values for each point on the object and road can be achieved. Using these data, the defects such as cracks in roads or port holes are detected, and the tactile information such as roughness on road surfaces can be obtained. In contrary of obtaining a tactile information with specific tactile sensor in previous tactile communication researches, we propose to achieve the tactile information from point cloud information itself. As a practical application using roughness estimation from point cloud data, the detecting a port hole on road is suggested. The distances between the reference point and each point are obtained, and the road condition is achieved by comparing these distances. The location of a port hole is detected by comparing the distances of neighboring points. When the difference of distances between neighboring points are larger than a certain threshold, we determine the existence of a port hole. The performance of proposed algorithm is evaluated by detecting error rate and simulation result shows that the port hole can be successfully detected with 3D point cloud data.