title: Boresight calibration of construction misalignments for 3D scanners built with a 2D laser range finder rotating on its optical center.
abstract: Many applications, like mobile robotics, can profit from acquiring dense, wide-ranging and accurate 3D laser data. Off-the-shelf 2D scanners are commonly customized with an extra rotation as a low-cost, lightweight and low-power-demanding solution. Moreover, aligning the extra rotation axis with the optical center allows the 3D device to maintain the same minimum range as the 2D scanner and avoids offsets in computing Cartesian coordinates. The paper proposes a practical procedure to estimate construction misalignments based on a single scan taken from an arbitrary position in an unprepared environment that contains planar surfaces of unknown dimensions. Inherited measurement limitations from low-cost 2D devices prevent the estimation of very small translation misalignments, so the calibration problem reduces to obtaining boresight parameters. The distinctive approach with respect to previous plane-based intrinsic calibration techniques is the iterative maximization of both the flatness and the area of visible planes. Calibration results are presented for a case study. The method is currently being applied as the final stage in the production of a commercial 3D rangefinder.
authors.affiliation: Departamento de Ingeniería de Sistemas y Automática, Universidad de Málaga, Andalucía Tech, 29071-Málaga, Spain. jesus.morales@uma.es.
authors.forename: Jesús
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Morales
authors.affiliation: Departamento de Ingeniería de Sistemas y Automática, Universidad de Málaga, Andalucía Tech, 29071-Málaga, Spain. jlmartinez@uma.es.
authors.forename: Jorge L
authors.initials: JL
authors.lastname: Martínez
authors.affiliation: Departamento de Ingeniería de Sistemas y Automática, Universidad de Málaga, Andalucía Tech, 29071-Málaga, Spain. amandow@uma.es.
authors.forename: Anthony
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Mandow
authors.affiliation: Departamento de Ingeniería de Sistemas y Automática, Universidad de Málaga, Andalucía Tech, 29071-Málaga, Spain. ajreina@uma.es.
authors.forename: Antonio J
authors.initials: AJ
authors.lastname: Reina
authors.affiliation: Ingeniería UNO, Calle Alcalde Garret y Souto, 38, 29006-Málaga, Spain. info@ingenieriauno.com.
authors.forename: Alejandro
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Pequeño-Boter
authors.affiliation: Departamento de Ingeniería de Sistemas y Automática, Universidad de Málaga, Andalucía Tech, 29071-Málaga, Spain. gcerezo@ctima.uma.es.
authors.forename: Alfonso
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: García-Cerezo