Sensors, Vol. 24, Pages 2494: A Compact Handheld Sensor Package with Sensor Fusion for Comprehensive and Robust 3D Mapping

Sensors, Vol. 24, Pages 2494: A Compact Handheld Sensor Package with Sensor Fusion for Comprehensive and Robust 3D Mapping Sensors doi: 10.3390/s24082494 Authors: Peng Wei Kaiming Fu Juan Villacres Thomas Ke Kay Krachenfels Curtis Ryan Stofer Nima Bayati Qikai Gao Bill Zhang Eric Vanacker Zhaodan Kong This paper introduces an innovative approach to 3D environmental mapping through the integration of a compact, handheld sensor package with a two-stage sensor fusion pipeline. The sensor package, incorporating LiDAR, IMU, RGB, and thermal cameras, enables comprehensive and robust 3D mapping of various environments. By leveraging Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) and thermal imaging, our solution offers good performance in conditions where global positioning is unavailable and in visually degraded environments. The sensor package runs a real-time LiDAR-Inertial SLAM algorithm, generating a dense point cloud map that accurately reconstructs the geometric features of the environment. Following the acquisition of that point cloud, we post-process these data by fusing them with images from the RGB and thermal cameras and produce a detailed, color-enriched 3D map that is useful and adaptable to different mission requirements. We demonstrated our system in a variety of scenarios, from indoor to outdoor conditions, and the results showcased the effectiveness and applicability of our sensor package and fusion pipeline. This system can be applied in ...
Source: Sensors - Category: Biotechnology Authors: Tags: Article Source Type: research