A Low-Cost and Portable Indoor 3D Mapping Approach Using Biaxial Line Laser Scanners and a One-Dimension Laser Range Finder Integrated with Microelectromechanical Systems

Abstract

Existing indoor 3D mapping solutions suffer from high cost and poor portability. In this article, a low-cost and portable indoor 3D mapping approach using biaxial line laser scanners and a one-dimension laser range finder integrated with microelectromechanical systems is proposed. A multiple-sensor calibration approach is presented to perform the extrinsic calibration of the integrated 3D mapping system. The 2D point cloud acquired by the horizontal laser scanner and the orientation information obtained by the microelectromechanical systems are used as inputs for a simultaneous localization and mapping framework to estimate the 2D poses. The height information acquired by the laser range finder is then fused to obtain the 3D pose, which is applied to restore the actual position and orientation of the 2D point cloud generated by the tilted laser scanner to reconstruct the 3D point cloud of the indoor environment. The experimental results—three typical indoor scenes—demonstrate that the proposed approach can achieve accuracies of 3 cm and 2°. Therefore, the proposed approach is a low-cost, portable, and accurate solution for indoor 3D mapping.