Study and development of a low cost “OptInertial” 3D scanner

The 3D scanner domain normally relies on the presence of many tools and technologies. They are mainly divided between contact and non-contact ones, but at present a new trend is coming up, starting from the articulated arms family, where the traditional mechanical joints, allowing flexible measures on complex objects, have been replaced by handy scanner with laser trackers, or with markers. These new systems have the advantage to get the entire object shape without changing the object position itself, but moving the scanning device without the involvement of long software alignments and post treatment operations. Anyway, the use of laser trackers obliges the operator to maintain the scanner head always visible, while the marker usage is quite critical because the measure precision depends strongly on the marker position. Starting from these considerations, the research project presented in this paper has been focused on the design and development of a flexible 3D scanner, without trackers and markers, that merge low-cost optical technologies together with low-cost inertial sensors. Thanks to this synergy, the developed 3D scanner is able to measure the three-dimensional shape of the object recording its movement and transferring it to a control unit for obtaining a point cloud. The paper presents the main concepts of the 3D scanner design and is concluded by an experimental phase made with the use of a benchmark.