A low-cost pipeline surface 3D detection method used on robots

This paper presents a low-cost pipeline surface 3D detection method based on line structured light. The method adds 3D detection to the robot at a meager cost and change. The optical flow method is used to derive the motion information of the robot to replace the motion closed loop. Finally, the depth data for the entire surface are generated automatically only from the camera and the line laser projector, without using other devices. In addition, a novel spot centroid extraction algorithm based on the color region of interest and an adaptive threshold is presented. This method can accurately detect the laser centroid in the pipeline surface. We conducted experiments with a quadruped robot and validated algorithms. The experimental results show that the proposed method achieves 3D detection on a trackless robot at a meager cost and is superior to standard depth sensors.