Title: 3D Reconstruction & Assessment Framework based on affordable 2D Lidar,
Abstract: Lidar is extensively used in the industry and mass-market. Due to its
measurement accuracy and insensitivity to illumination compared to cameras, It
is applied onto a broad range of applications, like geodetic engineering, self
driving cars or virtual reality. But the 3D Lidar with multi-beam is very
expensive, and the massive measurements data can not be fully leveraged on some
constrained platforms. The purpose of this paper is to explore the possibility
of using cheap 2D Lidar off-the-shelf, to preform complex 3D Reconstruction,
moreover, the generated 3D map quality is evaluated by our proposed metrics at
the end. The 3D map is constructed in two ways, one way in which the scan is
performed at known positions with an external rotary axis at another plane. The
other way, in which the 2D Lidar for mapping and another 2D Lidar for
localization are placed on a trolley, the trolley is pushed on the ground
arbitrarily. The generated maps by different approaches are converted to
octomaps uniformly before the evaluation. The similarity and difference between
two maps will be evaluated by the proposed metrics thoroughly. The whole
mapping system is composed of several modular components. A 3D bracket was made
for assembling of the Lidar with a long range, the driver and the motor
together. A cover platform made for the IMU and 2D Lidar with a shorter range
but high accuracy. The software is stacked up in different ROS packages.