Recognition of 3D objects for autonomous mobile robot's navigation in automated shipbuilding

Nowadays many parts of shipbuilding process are automated, but the painting process is not, because of the difficulty of automated on-line painting quality measurement, harsh painting environment and the difficulty of robot navigation. However, the painting automation is necessary, because it can provide consistent performance of painting film thickness. Furthermore, autonomous mobile robots are strongly required for flexible painting work. However, the main problem of autonomous mobile robot's navigation is that there are many obstacles which are not expressed in the CAD data. To overcome this problem, obstacle detection and recognition are necessary to avoid obstacles and painting work effectively. Until now many object recognition algorithms have been studied, especially 2D object recognition methods using intensity image have been widely studied. However, in our case environmental illumination does not exist, so these methods cannot be used. To overcome this, to use 3D range data must be used, but the problem of using 3D range data is high computational cost and long estimation time of recognition due to huge data base. In this paper, we propose a 3D object recognition algorithm based on PCA (Principle Component Analysis) and NN (Neural Network). In the algorithm, the novelty is that the measured 3D range data is transformed into intensity information, and then adopts the PCA and NN algorithm for transformed intensity information to reduce the processing time and make the data easy to handle which are disadvantages of previous researches of 3D object recognition. A set of experimental results are shown to verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.