I-Corps: Motion contrast 3D scanning technology

PROJECT SUMMARY Key Words: High Speed Motion Contrast 3D Scanning Outdoors Intellectual Merits: Existing laser and structured light techniques for 3D scanning suffer from trade-offs in speed, resolution, and light sensitivity that prevent their use in applications that require real-time, portable, and outdoor operation. We have demonstrated a laser scanning architecture using biologically inspired motion contrast sensors that circumvents existing tradeoffs to allow high speed, high resolution, light-robust shape acquisition. We propose to integrate our system into a simple autonomous mobile platform for comparison with existing techniques. Because of the benefits of our technique in the context of autonomous vehicles, we plan to demonstrate the viability of motion contrast 3D scanning in a wide variety of machine vision applications in science and industry. Broader Impacts: Motion-contrast 3D scanning, due to its high-speed outdoor capabilities, can improve road safety by advancing spatial awareness in autonomous cars or broaden our knowledge of planetary science by allowing remote probes to quickly and reliably scan terrain. This has significant implications in private industry, including: self-driving cars, precision agriculture, industrial automation, and consumer electronics.