View planning for automated site modeling

We present a systematic method for constructing 3-D models of large outdoor sites. The method is designed for a mobile robot platform and incorporates automated acquisition of scanned data as well as automated view planning and model construction. In our modeling process, we first use a preliminary view or set of preplanned views to yield an initial, approximate, 3-D model of the target structure. Then, we update this model by using a voxel-based procedure to plan and acquire the next best view. This updating is repeated sequentially until an accurate and complete 3-D model is finally obtained. The method was successfully tested on a portion of the Columbia University campus