An Interactive Environment Modeling System with Geometric Reasoning

Abstract

This paper describes an interactive system for geometric modeling of a manipulation environment. In man created environment, CAD models of geometric shape description for each object are often available. Therefore a geometric model of a real scene can be constructed by finding a position and orientation of each object. Geometric reasoning is developed to reduce necessary interactions by a human operator in the modeling process. This reasoning also enables to efficiently cope with a complicated real environment. The user of the system designates each object by its name and three points belonging to its different faces. The system calculates 3-D position of each point, and then together with the geometric shape description of the object the system generates all the possible position and orientation as location hypotheses. Erroneous location hypotheses are automatically discarded by actively testing presence in the scene of features of the hypotheses. Geometrical constraints induced by the environment are also used to reduce possible uncertainty of the model. Examples of secne modeling are given.