Tackling multi-sensory 3D data acquisition and fusion

The development of applications for multi-sensor data fusion typically faces heterogeneous hardware components, a variety of sensing principles and limited computational resources. We present a concept for synchronization and communication which tackles these challenges in multi-sensor systems in a unified manner. Here, a combination of hardware synchronization and deterministic software signals is promoted for global synchronization. Patterns of event-driven communication ensure that sensor data processing and evaluation are not bound to runtime constraints induced by data acquisition anymore. The combination of unified range and pose data description, event-driven communication, and global synchronization allows to build 3D sensing applications for various tasks. The proposed concept is implemented and evaluated for a variety of applications based on the DLR multisensory 3D-modeller. Extendability to other range and pose sensors is straightforward.