Feature Extraction of 3-Dimensional Objects with a Laser Tracker

Abstract

One important aspect in research on an intelligent robot is visual information processing. A visual device is required for an intelligent robot to perform various complicated tasks.This paper describes the principle and the construction of a Laser Tracker as a visual device with an “active” faculty. The Laser Tracker consists of flying-spot equipment and a 2-dimensional measuring device. The flying-spot equipment moves a laser spot freely and the measuring device obtains DC voltages according to the 2-dimensional coordinates of the brightest point in the range of an image dissector.This robot's eye acquires 3-dimensional coordinates of a laser spot on an object on the basis of the triangulation and then extracts the feature of the object corresponding to the purpose of the intelligent robot.At the first part of this article, the basic experiment to obtain 3-dimensional coordinates of a laser spot is reported.As one of applications, experimental results of classification and feature extraction of several3-dimensional objects are followed.