Adaptive pulsed laser line extraction for terrain reconstruction using a dynamic vision sensor.
Mobile robots need to know the terrain in which they are moving for path planning and obstacle avoidance. This paper proposes the combination of a bio-inspired, redundancy-suppressing dynamic vision sensor (DVS) with a pulsed line laser to allow fast terrain reconstruction. A stable laser stripe extraction is achieved by exploiting the sensor's ability to capture the temporal dynamics in a scene. An adaptive temporal filter for the sensor output allows a reliable reconstruction of 3D terrain surfaces. Laser stripe extractions up to pulsing frequencies of 500 Hz were achieved using a line laser of 3 mW at a distance of 45 cm using an event-based algorithm that exploits the sparseness of the sensor output. As a proof of concept, unstructured rapid prototype terrain samples have been successfully reconstructed with an accuracy of 2 mm.
Department of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, Institute of Neuroinformatics, ETH Zurich and University of Zurich Zurich, Switzerland.
Christian
C
Brandli
Autonomous Systems Lab, Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering, ETH Zurich Zurich, Switzerland.
Thomas A
TA
Mantel
Autonomous Systems Lab, Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering, ETH Zurich Zurich, Switzerland.
Marco
M
Hutter
Autonomous Systems Lab, Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering, ETH Zurich Zurich, Switzerland.
Markus A
MA
Höpflinger
Department of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, Institute of Neuroinformatics, ETH Zurich and University of Zurich Zurich, Switzerland.
Raphael
R
Berner
Autonomous Systems Lab, Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering, ETH Zurich Zurich, Switzerland.
Roland
R
Siegwart
Department of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, Institute of Neuroinformatics, ETH Zurich and University of Zurich Zurich, Switzerland.
Tobi
T
Delbruck
address-event representation (AER); dynamic vision sensor (DVS); event-based; neuromorphic; robotics; silicon retina