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High-accuracy, high-speed 3D structured light imaging techniques and potential applications to intelligent robotics

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Abstract

This paper presents some of the high-accuracy and high-speed structured light 3D imaging methods developed in the optical metrology community. These advanced 3D optical imaging technologies could substantially benefit the intelligent robotics community as another sensing tool. This paper mainly focuses on one special 3D imaging technique: the digital fringe projection (DFP) method because of its numerous advantageous features compared to other 3D optical imaging methods in terms of accuracy, resolution, speed, and flexibility. We will discuss technologies that enabled 3D data acquisition, reconstruction, and display at 30 Hz or higher with over 300,000 measurement points per frame. This paper intends to introduce the DFP technologies to the intelligent robotics community, and casts our perspectives on potential applications for which such sensing methods could be of value.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank many current and former students working in our laboratory for their tremendous work in advancing 3D imaging technologies to their current state. In particular, we would like to thank Dr. Yajun Wang for his development of binary dithering and optimal pulse width modulation methods; Dr. Nik Karpinsky for implementation of graphics processing unit (GPU) programming; Jae-Sang Hyun and Zexuan Zhu for their hardware system design and developments; and Maggie Hao, Chufan Jiang and Ziping Liu for serving as models to test our systems.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Mechanical Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, 47907, USA

    Beiwen Li, Yatong An, David Cappelleri & Song Zhang

  2. Department of Mechanical Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China

    Jing Xu

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  1. Beiwen Li
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Correspondence to Song Zhang.

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This research was supported by National Science Foundation research Grant Numbers CMMI-1523048 and CMMI-1531048.

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Li, B., An, Y., Cappelleri, D. et al. High-accuracy, high-speed 3D structured light imaging techniques and potential applications to intelligent robotics. Int J Intell Robot Appl 1, 86–103 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41315-016-0001-7

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