High-Accuracy 3D Sensing for Mobile Manipulators

Our demonstration shows the advantages of high-accuracy 3d scanning to the tasks of object detection and door opening. Specifically we show how to obtain depth data from a 3d line scanner directly in the image frame of reference. This allows us to associate a ""depth channel"" with each image pixel, i.e. each pixel is represented as a four dimensional vector comprising red, green, blue and depth. We then show how, using this representation, we can get near perfect door opening and object detection performance for a selection of common household/office objects. This level of accuracy on a mobile robot in uncontrolled environments have never been achieved before.