Development and Performance Evaluation of a Fast and Accurate Cost-effective Three-Dimensional (3-D) Laser Scanner
W-P. Zong, G-Y. LI, L. Wang, M-L. LI and Y-L. Zhou
Three-dimensional (3-D) perception and mapping has drawn incredibly increasing attention particularly in robotics and surveying communities. This paper presents a comprehensive study of a self-developed 3-D laser scanner consisting of off the shelf devices, mainly including a two-dimensional (2-D) laser scanner, a turntable and an incremental encoder. Different types of 3-D scanning patterns based on a 2-D scanner is discussed. Both hardware design and software implementation are introduced in detail to allow readers easily re-implement the system. Photorealistic point clouds acquired through field test performed in both indoor and outdoor scenarios are shown and then data processing techniques are introduced, such as point cloud denoising, reduction and registration. Experiments regarding performance evaluation demonstrate that its positional accuracy is around 3 mm at 4 m, average spatial distance accuracy 3.6 mm and flatness 2.1 mm. Besides, the result of 3-D modelling a woodcarving indicates its promising performance relative to cost. The system will be further improved over the course of practical usage for 3-D localization and mapping.
Keywords: Laser scanner, LiDAR construction, three-dimensional (3-D) perception, performance evaluation, point cloud