Scanning Bot: Efficient Scan Planning using Panoramic Cameras

-- Panoramic RGB-D cameras are known for their ability to produce high-quality 3D scene reconstructions. However, operating these cameras involves manually selecting viewpoints and physically transporting the camera, making the generation of a 3D model time-consuming and tedious. Additionally, the process can be challenging for novice users due to spatial constraints, such as ensuring sufficient feature overlap between viewpoint frames. T o address these challenges, we propose a fully autonomous scan planning system that generates an efficient tour plan for environment scanning, ensuring collision-free navigation and adequate overlap between viewpoints within the plan. Extensive experiments conducted in both synthetic and real-world environments validate our planner's performance against state-of-the-art view planners. In particular, our method achieved an average scan coverage of 99% in the real-world experiment, with our approach being up to 3 faster than state-of-the-art planners in total scan time. The increasing advancements in mobile robotics research have enhanced robots' ability to improve the efficiency and completeness of outcomes in various active trajectory planning tasks.