Abstract
Many applications, like mobile robotics, can profit from acquiring dense, wide-ranging and accurate 3D laser data. Off-the-shelf 2D scanners are commonly customized with an extra rotation as a low-cost, lightweight and low-power-demanding solution. Moreover, aligning the extra rotation axis with the optical center allows the 3D device to maintain the same minimum range as the 2D scanner and avoids offsets in computing Cartesian coordinates. The paper proposes a practical procedure to estimate construction misalignments based on a single scan taken from an arbitrary position in an unprepared environment that contains planar surfaces of unknown dimensions. Inherited measurement limitations from low-cost 2D devices prevent the estimation of very small translation misalignments, so the calibration problem reduces to obtaining boresight parameters. The distinctive approach with respect to previous plane-based intrinsic calibration techniques is the iterative maximization of both the flatness and the area of visible planes. Calibration results are presented for a case study. The method is currently being applied as the final stage in the production of a commercial 3D rangefinder.
Highlights
Many promising applications of mobile robotics rely on three-dimensional (3D) data
It is desirable that the optical center of the scanner coincides with that of the 2D device [11,12,13,14], even if many designs do not consider this alignment for the sake of mechanical simplicity [8,9,10,15,16,17]
Inherited measurement limitations from this kind of 2D device prevent the estimation of very small translation misalignments, so the calibration problem reduces to obtaining boresight parameters
Summary
Many promising applications of mobile robotics rely on three-dimensional (3D) data. Examples include warehouse automation [1], construction machinery [2], intelligent vehicles [3], planetary navigation [4], natural terrain exploration [5] and search and rescue [6]. Even if some calibration methods have explored maximization of overall point cloud quality from several scans [18,25,30], most approaches are based on capturing particular objects Among the latter, using artificial targets requires engineered environments [22,24,31,32,33]. The paper presents a practical intrinsic calibration procedure for 3D scanners with a low-cost 2D laser rangefinder rotating on its optical center. Inherited measurement limitations from this kind of 2D device prevent the estimation of very small translation misalignments, so the calibration problem reduces to obtaining boresight (i.e., orientation) parameters. To this end, optimal parameters are obtained from a single 3D scan that contains at least one planar surface of unknown.
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