Point Cloud 3D Reconstruction: ROS implementation of point cloud 3D reconstruction from a 2D profile scanner.

This thesis will report the description of the work done during my internship in the innovation department of robotics and artificial intelligence in Acciona company, in the community of Madrid. Among all the robotic platforms present in the department, the choice was to use a collaborative robotic arm and a laser line profile scanner in order to create a system capable to scan any object and reconstruct it as a dense and precise point cloud in a digital environment. The profile laser scanner is the Gocator 2350D, which is mounted on the robotic arm UR10. The first one is a 2D laser profile scan which provides at each instant of time the profile of the object it is scanning. The second one is a collaborative robotic arm, an articulated robot with 6 axis and 5 joints. The laser scanner provides at each instant of time a 2D laser profile of the object detected. These data are taken out and transformed into a ROS message which gives information about the coordinates of all the points that constitute the line profile with respect to the reference system of the laser. So, at each instant of time, a message is provided. All the messages obtained over the time are concatenated in a message which represents only one dense and precise point cloud and transformed with respect to the coordinate system of the robots. In this way, a movement of the robotic arm (and consequently of the laser scanner mounted on it) influences the position and the orientation of the point cloud. So, the resulting point cloud is a coherent representation of the 3D object scanned. This project has been thought also in relation to the 3D printing department belonging to the same company. In fact, the result achieved can be compared to the original file that is generally used for printing and, mounting a milling tool in the robotic arm, it is possible to remove the material in excess, for example the material of the supports that are used to allow a correct printing of a defined structure.