Low Cost 3D Scanner by Means of a 1D Optical Distance Sensor

Nowadays, 3D scanners have become widely used tools in different disciplines, such as robotics, medicine and manufacturing. These devices are capable of representing virtual 3D objects with extremely good accuracy, but they are very expensive, making them not affordable for research institutions with low economical resources. Because of that, many authors have been worked on projects to develop low cost 3D scanners implementing different methodologies and technologies. This article shows a methodology to develop a prototype of a 3D scanner device that can represent virtual 3D objects from distance measurements obtained by a 1D optical distance sensor. Essentially, the device consists of three elements, an electromechanical platform, a data acquisition hardware (controlled by the PIC18F4550 microcontroller) and a graphical user interface, programmed in Matlab language.The results obtained by scanning different solid objects are very promising and show the effectiveness of the presented approach and good functionality of the device.