Mobile Robot Active Environment Perception And3-D Scene Digitization

Mobile robot active environment perception and3-D scene digitization is a hotspot in the field of mobile robot problems. The active environment perception is the precondition and foundation for robot’s obstacle avoidance, localization and navigation. And3-D scene’s digitization has broad application prospects in virtual reality, historic preservation, topographic survey and other fields. This article utilizes Kinect sensor and3-D laser ranging system to perceive the surroundings around the robot and make the3-D scene’s digitization come true.Our lab has developed independently the SmartROB mobile robot platform. The platform adopted open source robot operating system (ROS). And two SmartROB robots which are able to perceive the surroundings are respectively equipped with ASUS Xtion PRO and3-D laser ranging system. When perceiving the surroundings using SmartROB platform equipped with ASUS Xtion PRO, OpenNI, Kinect’s open source driver, was used to develop the robot SmartROB’s remote control system. The controller’s control command was caught by remote control terminal and sent to the robot via TCP/IP. At the same time, the robot determine the obstacle avoiding strategy according to the3-D point cloud information of the scene in front of the robot achieved by the ASUS Xtion PRO sensor. So the safe and remote control of the robot can be realized by the fusion of the control command and obstacle avoiding command.The3-D laser ranging system was calibrated before it was used to perceive the surroundings. The raw data got by the laser are successively shifted to the coordinate system of the holder and the coordinate system of the robot by two-time horizontal rotating movement. For the error during the horizontal rotating movement, Newton descent method and ICP are respectively used to get the accurate rotating translational matrix with assistant calibration objects. And then the pose value of the robot is used to compensate the3-D point cloud in the coordinate system of the robot, which enable the robot to perceive the surroundings in the process of movement.Experiments were done on the mobile robot platform SmartROB which is based on ROS. And the results indicated that the algorithm used to perceive the surroundings and the3-D scene digitization algorithm are effective and practicle.