Development of a mobile robot equipped with a depth sensor

Abstract

Efficient modeling of surrounding environments is necessary in provision of augmented reality services and productions of computer graphics works. This study discusses 3D shape reconstruction using a robot equipped with a depth sensor to reduce the time and effort required for the modeling. The robot has a stepping motor for changing the angle of the depth sensor and two DC motors for changing the robot’s location. It is necessary to estimate two parameters including the position and the angle in capturing each depth image to align the obtained depth images into a virtual 3D scene. We investigated two different methods to estimate the parameters. The first method calculates the parameters of the sensor from the amount of rotation of the actuators equipped on the robot. On the other hand, the second method calculates the parameters by applying ICP (Iterative Closest Point) to the depth images. These two methods were compared on the basis of experimental results.