A flexible 3D scanning system using convergent stereo vision integrated with an industrial manipulator

This paper proposes a flexible three-dimensional (3D) scanning system based on an active stereo scanner mounted on a six degrees of freedom (6-DOF) industrial robot arm. In addition, we reduce the blind area of sensors by adding one more DOF to adjust the convergent angle of the two cameras. This configuration is suitable for scanning items with different sizes, complex shapes, and sophisticated structures due to the flexibility in approaching the object. Then, the research develops a robot-based iterative closest point method for point cloud registration. This 3D reconstruction strategy enhances the accuracy as well as the computational time of the point cloud processing. After that, we conduct several real-world experiments to examine the effectiveness of the proposed system and algorithm.