Indoor Modeling for Interactive Robot Service

This paper presents our simple and easy to use method to obtain a 3D textured model. For expression of reality, we need to integrate the 3D models and real scenes. Most of other cases of 3D modeling method consist of two data acquisition devices. In this case, the former device would be 2D laser range-finder and the latter device would be common camera. Our algorithm consists of building a measurement-based 2D metric map which is acquired by laser range-finder, texture acquisition/stitching and texture-mapping to corresponding 3D model. The algorithm is implemented with laser sensor. Our geometric 3D model consists of planes that model the floor and walls. The geometry of the planes is extracted from the 2D metric map data. Textures for the floor and walls are generated from the images captured by two 1394 cameras which have wide field of view angle. Image stitching and image cutting process is used to generate textured images for corresponding with a 3D model. The generated 3D map model of indoor environment is shown with VRML format and can be viewed in a Web browser with a VRML plug-in. The proposed algorithm can be applied to 3D model-based remote surveillance system through WWW. The application terminals of the environment model for interactive robot service that we consider are PC, PDA and mobile phone. Because of characteristic of device resource limitation, 3D model is focused only on PC environment