Robotic autonomous inspection


  • Dear Matter and Form team,

    I am a researcher working on robotic sensing for remote, autonomous inspection of modular systems.  Ultimately we hope to be able to do autonomous inspection tasks in space and other distant environments but at the moment we are at the lab demonstration stage.

    I am looking for object scanners that can identify objects in 3D - usually modular components of 100x100x100mm up to 300x300x300mm but larger would be helpful also.   We need to capture the geometry for comparison to "good" geometric models but also we would like to detect the surface conditions, e.g. detect holes, cracks and bends caused by wear and tear.  The goal is to detect impact damage and deformation on surfaces down to ~0.3mm size if possible but if this is infeasible detecting ~1mm features would be sufficient.

    The scanner will be held by a robot arm, so kinematics and localization are known.  We need to read the data into a Linux-based embedded computer such as an NVidia Jetson development kit for autonomous analysis so use of Desktop software is not an option.  The working distance will be approximately 1m maximum, the minimum is not limited but could be ~10cm for reasonable field of view.  Scanning size is not a restriction as we can move the robot to tile measurements together, but it would be ideal if we could image approximately a 300mm x 300mm area within 1m of working distance. 

    Would THREE be suitable for this kind of sensing, and can you recommend a software or processing methodology we can use with it under autonomous control?

    Thanks very much,
    --Mark

     

     



  • Hi Mark, thanks for your question! First off, we've not tested the scanner in the cold depths of space, I suspect if it is frozen it's not going to work. But leaving that aside...

    The scanner can be mounted to a robotic arm and reading the scan data into your system is no issue at all.

    In terms of object recognition you should take a look through Open3D https://www.open3d.org/

    We've just released our Python library and a quick introduction post on the Python library, including links to the library and example code, is here: https://www.matterandform.net/community/xenforum/topic/147995/announcing-the-first-release-of-the-matter-and-form-three-python-library

    The object scan areas you mention are all fine - THREE's scan distance is 20 to 80cm, which translates to a 15 x 6 cm scan area at 20cm distance, to 48cm x 35cm scan area at 80cm.

    Let me know if you have more questions!

    Trevor.

     


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