An advanced laser rangefinder equipped with a scanning simulator

In industry, a laser rangefinder based on an active triangulation technique is useful because it is able to achieve a favorable balance between measurement accuracy and measurement time. However, conventional triangulation-based range-finders are known to be difficult to apply to the 3-D shape measurement of specular objects. We previously proposed an advanced laser rangefinder to obtain the 3-D shape of specular objects. In this paper, we develop a prototype rangefinder equipped with the laser scanning simulator based on inverse ray tracing to scan specular objects efficiently.