Volumetric view planning for 3D reconstruction with multiple manipulators

Abstract

Purpose– This paper aims to propose a new view planning method which can be used to calculate the next-best-view (NBV) for multiple manipulators simultaneously and build an automated three-dimensional (3D) object reconstruction system, which is based on the proposed method and can adapt to various industrial applications.Design/methodology/approach– The entire 3D space is encoded with octree, which marks the voxels with different tags. A set of candidate viewpoints is generated, filtered and evaluated. The viewpoint with the highest score is selected as the NBV.Findings– The proposed method is able to make the multiple manipulators, equipped with “eye-in-hand” RGB-D sensors, work together to accelerate the object reconstruction process.Originality/value– Compared to the existed approaches, the proposed method in this paper is fast, computationally efficient, has low memory cost and can be used in actual industrial productions where the multiple different manipulators exist. And, more notably, a new algorithm is designed to speed up the generation and filtration of the candidate viewpoints, which can guarantee both speed and quality.