Study on online 3D environment construction for teleoperation

On remote operation of a robot, it is important to provide the situation around the robot for the operator intelligibly and quickly. This paper presents an online 3D environment map construction by using a robot operated remotely. The environment data is acquired with only a stereo camera mounted on the robot. The 3D environment map is constructed incrementally from the data by online processing. Specifically, the map is provided by polygon-meshes with color, which are generated from environment point clouds. As for online construction of the map, the system has to execute divided process modules in parallel, in order to decentralize processing loads. This paper explains the system architecture to execute the process modules in parallel, and the details of the hardware in which the constructed system is implemented. Implementation of the system to a small mobile robot is also described. Feasibility of our system will be discussed on experimental results of 3D map construction in an imitated environment.