RoμNect: Hand mounted depth sensing using a commodity gaming sensor

Christian Reinbacher, Matthias Rüther, Horst Bischof

Abstract: In this work, we investigate the applicability of the Kinect depth camera as a robot mounted measurement unit. In contrast to traditional head mounted robot sensors, Kinect is small, cheap and delivers robust depth measurements on a variety of scenes. In the course of applying it on a robot arm, we solve a number of problems: we reduce the sensor working distance to a few centimeters, replace the Laser projector unit by a focusable projector, and calibrate this sensor unit. We further exploit the motion capabilities of the robot arm to integrate multiple depth maps with 30 Hz in a volumetric fusion approach. We show how this method considerably improves completeness of the scanned models, even under severe reflections and difficult surface properties. We employ our approach in a classical bin-picking setting, where the robot scans the object during its approaching motion, and picks it afterwards.