Suggested starting points for 3d scanner design

[theycallmevirgo]

TL;DR Summary

How can I use a robot arm and a precision turntable for 3d scanning

My school recently got an industrial robot arm with a precision turntable. I was thinking how to use this with some cameras/lasers to make a 3d scanner. Where would you folks recommend I start looking?

 

[berkeman]

@Ranger Mike has good experience with such measurements, I believe. Check out this video that he posted in another thread recently to see if it starts to give you some ideas:

https://www.physicsforums.com/threa...hine-without-interfering.977951/#post-6241120

 

[Ranger Mike]

glad to advise as i can...

 

[theycallmevirgo]

Thanks so much folks, but that seems like 2 arms using a physical gauge. At best I would be forced to use a tof sensor. I have one arm and probably will use a structured light system.

 

[berkeman]

I have one arm and probably will use a structured light system.

A good friend of mine has worked in the field of imaging and 3-D reconstruction for a while. Here is a link to a number of papers he has published:

https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/9133547_Tom_Malzbender

In particular these two may be of interest:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/2328661_A_Survey_of_Methods_for_Volumetric_Scene_Reconstruction_from_Photographs

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/2895581_Enhancement_of_Shape_Perception_by_Surface_Reflectance

 

[berkeman]

Also, you could trace the object in 3-D with the arm tip (assuming that you have encoders on all of its joints and on the turntable position), but the shape that you trace will have to have some constraints on it in order to be able to fully trace it, and it will take a lot of time to do the tracing with much resolution...

 

[theycallmevirgo]

Thanks so much for your help. It seems, I did not do enough digging on github before asking this. This is more or less a solved problem within OpenCV computer vision library. There is also a prebuilt package using another algorithm, now I just need to figure the logistics.