Effective compression of range data streams for remote robot operations using H.264

Most robots need the ability to communicate with a base station or with an operator during their mission. Teleoperated and semi-autonomous robots typically communicate continuously through a network connection with an operator. Transmitting raw sensor data over a low bandwidth network such as wireless or HSDPA, however, is problematic as the stream of sensor data is often large. In this paper, we present a method that exploits H.264 compression to reduce the size of range data streams from sensors such as the Kinect camera or the Velodyne 3D laser scanner. We developed a practical and effective solution that exploits the state of the art in video compression to produce high-quality results. Our method is easy to implement and can have practical impact for researchers building robots for the real world. We implemented and thoroughly tested our approach using a large number of range data streams. Furthermore, we analyzed the impact of data compression on the accuracy and size of the transmitted data. We show that even a highly compressed stream of depth images can be used with dense mapping techniques such as KinFu for building environment models.