An omnidirectional 3D sensor with line laser scanning

• Present an omnidirectional sensor with rotating line laser.
• Develop a simple calibration method.
• Evaluate the system with two experiments.

An active omnidirectional vision owns the advantages of the wide field of view (FOV) imaging, resulting in an entire 3D environment scene, which is promising in the field of robot navigation. However, the existing omnidirectional vision sensors based on line laser can measure points only located on the optical plane of the line laser beam, resulting in the low-resolution reconstruction. Whereas, to improve resolution, some other omnidirectional vision sensors with the capability of projecting 2D encode pattern from projector and curved mirror. However, the astigmatism property of curve mirror causes the low-accuracy reconstruction. To solve the above problems, a rotating polygon scanning mirror is used to scan the object in the vertical direction so that an entire profile of the observed scene can be obtained at high accuracy, without of astigmatism phenomenon. Then, the proposed method is calibrated by a conventional 2D checkerboard plate. The experimental results show that the measurement error of the 3D omnidirectional sensor is approximately 1 mm. Moreover, the reconstruction of objects with different shapes based on the developed sensor is also verified.