SBIR-STTR Award

The primary objective of this proposed work is to study the feasibility and build a prototype of a high speed, low-cost, multi-mode 3D ranging system for robotics and other applications. The Color-ranger system provides capabilities that no other currently available 3D rangefinder achieves. This system is able to capture full frame 3D range data at the frame rate of the camera. Therefore, it is suitable for high speed, real-time robotics applications. Since there are no mechanical moving parts in our Color-ranger system, the mechanical design can be very simple and reliable. All components in this system are available off-the-shelf which leads to low cost. With the active light source turned on, the color camera can provide 3D range data, and with the active light source turned off, the same camera provides normal intensity images. This multi-mode capability greatly simplifies the problems of multiple sensor integration and sensor data fusion. Depending on the applications, the scope of the color spectrum of LVWF can be selected from 400 to 750 nm in visible light region. The Color-ranger system is not based on a laser therefore there are no eye safety problems. This is certainly desirable for wide range of medical applications, for collision avoidance in mobile vehicles, and for other applications.

This Small Business Innovation Research Phase II project is to study a novel three dimensional (3D) camera concept called the Color 3D Camera. The Color 3D camera, is able to capture 3D images of objects in the scene at camera's frame rate (30 frames per second or faster). Because the system uses only one CCD camera, it eliminates the time consuming and often ambiguous correspondence problem of conventional stereo vision systems. There are no moving parts, nor mechanical scanning mechanisms. The 3D camera is also able to provide normal color 2D intensity images in addition to 3D range images of the scene which facilitates object recognition and sensor fusion tasks in many machine vision applications. The feasibility of the Color 3D camera has been investigated theoretically and demonstrated experimentally during the phase I effort. The design philosophy of the phase II prototype will be to integrate seamlessly system's function modules in a compact printed circuit board equipped with multiple DSP processors. All the image acquiring, image processing and range calculation will be performed on-board so the real-time range images can be produced. Building a seamlessly integrated low cost high speed 3D vision system as a product line of Robotronics, Inc. is a key to commercialize this SBIR research results of the color 3D camera. Such products will make a reliable and inexpensive 3D vision capability widely available to many practical machine vision applications.