AUTHOR=Brandli Christian , Mantel Thomas , Hutter Marco , Höpflinger Markus , Berner Raphael , Siegwart Roland , Delbruck Tobi TITLE=Adaptive pulsed laser line extraction for terrain reconstruction using a dynamic vision sensor JOURNAL=Frontiers in Neuroscience VOLUME=7 YEAR=2014 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnins.2013.00275 DOI=10.3389/fnins.2013.00275 ISSN=1662-453X ABSTRACT=

Mobile robots need to know the terrain in which they are moving for path planning and obstacle avoidance. This paper proposes the combination of a bio-inspired, redundancy-suppressing dynamic vision sensor (DVS) with a pulsed line laser to allow fast terrain reconstruction. A stable laser stripe extraction is achieved by exploiting the sensor's ability to capture the temporal dynamics in a scene. An adaptive temporal filter for the sensor output allows a reliable reconstruction of 3D terrain surfaces. Laser stripe extractions up to pulsing frequencies of 500 Hz were achieved using a line laser of 3 mW at a distance of 45 cm using an event-based algorithm that exploits the sparseness of the sensor output. As a proof of concept, unstructured rapid prototype terrain samples have been successfully reconstructed with an accuracy of 2 mm.