A Case Study on Retroreflective Marker Usage in Industrial 3D Lidar Applications

The usage of lidar sensors is becoming increasingly more popular in a variety of industrial applications. Retroreflective markers can be used to support the analysis of the lidar data by providing highly reflective landmarks in the generated point clouds. After giving a short overview over lidar and the principle behind retroreflective markers our work concentrates on the real-world application of these markers and the benefits and challenges, they provide. We give a comprehensive overview over existing applications and their used types of retroreflective markers. We also present three of our own use cases that demonstrate the benefits retroreflective markers can provide for the analysis of lidar data in industrial contexts. A lidar based solution for crane operations surveillance in a foundry is presented that uses retroreflective markers to simplify object localisation processes and increases their stability. A second application uses markers to support the AI based classification of hard to distinguish object categories. Lastly the usage of markers in an underground mining scenario for SLAM is presented. We as well point out the considerations that have to be taken into account before choosing a specific retroreflective marker and using it in a real-world application.