A LiDAR for All Applications

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3D SCANNING FOR A BRA (AND BREAST CANCER AWARENESS)

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News, 3D Scanners, BIM, Civil/Transportation, Digital Preservation of Historic Assets, DigitalVisualization, Geospatial imagery/video, Geospatial mapping, LiDAR, Lidar systems,Mining/Geotechnical, Mobile Scanning and Mapping, Offshore oil & gas

A LiDAR for All Applications?

Written by SPAR Point Group Staff

The RobotEye LiDAR sensor in Region Scanning mode

Australian company Ocular Robotics are known for their RobotEye products, sensor platformsdesigned to meet the sensing needs of a wide variety of industries. This line includes two LiDARscanners, the RobotEye RE05 and RE08, which Ocular Robotics touts as “the world’s smartest 3Dlaser scanners” enabling “on-the-fly adjustment of scan region and scan resolution.”

According to the company, the scanners can be used for a whole raft of applications includingrobotics, automation, mining, agriculture, surveillance, aerospace and defense, and rapid 3Dmapping. Are they scanners for all applications?

What the Scanners Can DoThe RobotEye LiDAR scanners are best described by their three programmable scanning modes,each of which allows you to specify a portion of the scanner’s range for capture. Full FieldScanning covers the entire 360 degree rotation of the scanner at up to 70 degrees elevation.Bounded Elevation Scanning allows you to scan for specific bands of elevation for capture, theselook like rings around the scanner. Region Scanning allows you to scan a specific rectangleanywhere within the sensor’s range.

See the video below for a visual illustration of these modes.

Next, all modes allow you to define scan and laser parameters: the azimuth scan rate, the numberof scan lines captured per degree of elevation, the total sample rate, and sample averaging.

The RobotEye sensor platform’s real claim to fame is its ability to change between scanningmodes on the fly. Using RobotEye’s C++ library, you can create single commands to change thebehavior of the scanner. In the middle of a scan, you can swap scan mode, scan parameters, andlaser parameters. In other words, it allows you to tweak your scan as you go, building a fullcapture by cobbling together different scan modes and resolutions for different regions of thescan.

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The RobotEye LiDAR systems do not seem to be designed for absolute beginners. But if you’re apower user with a good understanding of your task, you can set the scanner to capture only whatyou need, and only at the resolution you need it. Ocular Robotics says the RobotEye LiDARsystems can help you to find the right balance of resolution and acquisition time to complete yourprojects faster.

For Mapping and CaptureSimilar abilities are present in other existing LiDAR devices, but the RobotEye offers a subtletweak. It does not require you to perform a full low-resolution 360 degree scan, pull up a preview,and then define a window to scan at high resolution. Furthermore, the RobotEye’s sensor platformallows drive components and sensors to remain stationary during capture. As seen in the abovevideo, this means that the mirror does not have to rotate a full 360 degrees if you are capturing asingle region—and this saves extra time.

Focused and programmable scanning could be useful for scanning key elements in a higherresolution than the rest of the scan, like points of particular interest. In the petrochemical industry,for instance, this could be existing flanges that are going to be reused, equipment mounts, and soon. Of course, if you are going to scan a specific region and leave out others, it will require thoughtto be sure that you have captured all the data you need.

Though there is certainly a wide range of possible uses for this scanner, questions of speed andcomplexity mean the product may or may not be right for your application.

The RobotEye RE05 mounted on the FOXIRIS autonomous robot as part of the ARGOS challenge

For Robotics and Autonomous Device ApplicationsIn speaking with Ocular Robotics commercial director, Dr. Ramin Rafiei, I learned that theRobotEye LiDAR scanners are especially well suited for use in the field of robotics. Indeed, thescanners are already seeing wide use and recognition in that field—Rafiei had just returned to

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Australia from San Jose where Ocular Robotics took home a Next Generation Game ChangerAward from the 2015 RoboBusiness Conference.

As Rafiei explained the RobotEye RE05 and RE08 LiDAR systems, the scanners “empower arobot or autonomous system to dynamically interact with its environment.” An autonomousplatform using a single RobotEye LiDAR scanner, for instance, can “collect all the information itrequires for obstacle avoidance, navigation, localization, dense 3D mapping, and objectmanipulation.” Generally, these tasks would require separate scanners, since each task requires aspecific type of behavior from its scanner.

“To navigate between locations,” Rafiei said, “all that may be required is a few sparse linescentered on the horizon that can be updated quickly for obstacle avoidance. For sufficiently densepoint data to identify an object on the floor perhaps 20 or 30 lines between -15 and -35 degrees inelevation might be appropriate. To manipulate an object, 60 lines across a 6 degree by 18 degreerectangular region might be needed. Ocular Robotics 3D LiDAR sensors are capable of fulfilling allof these functions with a single device, the behavior of these scanners can be updated moment bymoment to be always delivering 3D data from the region and at the resolution needed.”

The RobotEye RE05 mounted on the ROVINA autonomous robot

Notably, this flexibility has helped land the RobotEye scanners on a number of high-profile robots,including the ROVINA robots (which SPAR featured here), which are autonomous devices built aspart of a European consortium to navigate, map, and capture archaeological sites that are difficultor impossible for humans to enter. “Our RE05 3D LiDAR scanners are mounted on each of theROVINA robots and are used for all navigation tasks as well as to acquire the high-resolution 3Dmaps used to build the digital models.”

When mounted on a robot, the RobotEye scanners sound perfect for capturing manyenvironments that are dangerous for humans, for instance certain parts of mines, or disaster sites.

In closing, Rafiei offered one more enticing application for the RobotEye products. “Just imaginehow drastically Boeing could increase the dynamic performance of their recently released dronelaser cannon if it was built on a RobotEye core.”

It doesn’t get much more futuristic than that.


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A LiDAR for All Applications