3D Surface Reconstruction for Robotic Body Parts with Artificial Skins

In this paper, we present a new approach to reconstruct the 3D surface of robotic body parts equipped with artificial skins. We do so by fusing static knowledge on the shape, size and tessellation capabilities of the uniform cell our skin consists of, together with dynamic knowledge on its neighbors and measurements from its orientation sensor - a 3-axis accelerometer. Our approach makes it possible to reconstruct the 3D surface of robotic body parts equipped with a patch of skin in a very short time, providing the location and orientation of every unit in a patch relative to an automatically chosen origin on the patch, utilizing no external sensors and only robot independent information. We show experimental results on the 3D reconstruction of different skin patches.