A Real-time Compact Structured-light based Range Sensing System

In this paper, we propose a new approach for compact range sensor system for real-time robot applications. Instead of using off-the-shelf camera and projector, we devise a compact system with a CMOS image-sensor and a DMD (Digital Micromirror Device) that yields smaller dimension (168x50x60mm) and lighter weight (500g). We also realize one chip hard-wired processing of projection of structured-light and computing the range by exploiting correspondences between CMOS imagesensor and DMD. This application-specific chip processing is implemented on an FPGA in real-time. Our range acquisition system performs 30 times faster than the same implementation in software. We also devise an efficient methodology to identify a proper light intensity to enhance the quality of range sensor and minimize the decoding error. Our experimental results show that the total-error is reduced by 16% compared to the average case. KCI Citation Count: 4