In a planetary surface exploration, to gather a rock, it is necessary how to get information of the surface around a sample. Usually, a surface information is brought by a special sensor such as Laser Range Finder and Stereo Camera. These sensors, however, need more weight and power consumption, and are used for only one function such as the surface measurement. And furthermore, there are some difficulties to use those sensors in some case. For example, the lunar surface has very strong luminous intensity, which is enough to make a halation, and sometimes, those sensors don't work. In the case of a stereo camera system, the matching process would be failed by above luminous intensity caused by the sunlight. Therefore we need a method to measure a surface without a special equipment and the influences of the sunlight. In this paper, we propose Shadow Range Finder: SRF, which can make good use of a shadow for the measurement of a surface information under the direct sunlight. Shadow is stable for above-mentioned problem, and would be recognized in the case of a halation. The SRF uses a single camera, which should be installed on a manipulator for a sampling, and a link of a manipulator, which produce its shadow on a measured surface. The principle of SRF is same as Laser Range Finder, and a shadow is used for scanning slit instead of a laser. In this paper, we measure a real object such as stone and evaluate a validity of SRF.
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