View planning for 3D object reconstruction

For manipulating an unknown object a robot needs a 3D model of it. Given the limited field of view of a camera and self occlusions, a set of views is required to build a complete 3D model, so an important problem is how to select these views optimally according to certain criteria. We propose a novel algorithm to select the next-best-view (NBV) for a range camera to model 3D arbitrary objects. We use a volumetric representation and voxel labeling. We propose a new utility function based on factors considering voxel, quality and navigation information. We also propose two novel strategies to make faster the search of the NBV, one based on a hierarchical decomposition of the search space and other based on a multi-resolution of ray tracing. We have tested our planner in simulation with 7 different 3D objects, showing good results in terms of quality of the models and computation time required, and at the same time reducing the distance that the sensor has to travel to obtain the set of views.