Design and Evaluation of a Teleoperated Robotic 3-D Mapping System using an RGB-D Sensor

In this correspondence paper, we develop a teleoperated robotic 3-D mapping (TeRoM) system which enables efficient human-guided mapping of remote environments for realistic rendering and visualization. First, the hardware design of the TeRoM system is proposed which is based on a Pioneer mobile robot platform and a rotating RGB-D camera. A client/server architecture is developed to allow the data to be processed in a remote server, which makes it possible to implement 3-D mapping on robots with limited resources. Second, a 3-D map is created in real-time while an operator controls the robot and the pan-tilt unit remotely using a joystick. Then the map is converted into a mesh using the marching cubes algorithm and optimized to reduce the data volume. Finally the mesh is imported and rendered in a 3-D rendering engine for interactive and intuitive display. We evaluate the performance of the TeRoM system in terms of accuracy, processing speed, reliability, and manipulability.