High speed 3D IR scanner for home service robots

This paper introduces the hardware platform of the structured light processing based on depth imaging to perform a 3D modeling of cluttered workspace for home service robots. We have discovered that the degradation of precision and robustness comes mainly from the overlapping of multiple codes in the signal received at a camera pixel. Considering the criticality of separating the overlapped codes to precision and robustness, we proposed a novel signal separation code, referred to here as "Hierarchically Orthogonal Code (HOC)," for depth imaging. The proposed HOC algorithm was implemented by using hardware platform which applies the Xilinx XC2V6000 FPGA to perform a real time 3D modeling and the invisible IR (Infrared) pattern lights to eliminate any inconveniences for the home environment. The experimental results have shown that the proposed HOC algorithm significantly enhances the robustness and precision in depth imaging, compared to the best known conventional approaches. Furthermore, after we processed the HOC algorithm implemented on our hardware platform, the results showed that it required 34 ms of time to generate one 3D image. This processing time is about 24 times faster than the same implementation of HOC algorithm using software, and the real-time processing is realized.