Rapid world modeling: Fitting range data to geometric primitives

摘要

For the past seven years, Sandia National Laboratories has been active in the development of robotic systems to help remediate DOE's waste sites and decommissioned facilities. Some of these facilities have high levels of radioactivity which prevent manual clean-up. Tele-operated and autonomous robotic systems have been envisioned as the only suitable means of removing the radioactive elements. World modeling is defined as the process of creating a numerical geometric model of a real world environment or workspace. This model is often used in robotics to plan robot motions which perform a task while avoiding obstacles. In many applications where the world model does not exist ahead of time, structured lighting, laser range finders, and even acoustical sensors have been used to create three dimensional maps of the environment. These maps consist of thousands of range points which are difficult to handle and interpret. This paper presents a least squares technique for fitting range data to planar and quadric surfaces, including cylinders and ellipsoids. Once fit to these primitive surfaces, the amount of data associated with a surface is greatly reduced up to three orders of magnitude, thus allowing for more rapid handling and analysis of world data.