A Mobile Robotic Approach to Autonomous Surface Scanning in Legal Medicine

Abstract

Purpose: Comprehensive legal medicine documentation includes both an internal but also an external examination of the corpse. Typically, this documentation is conducted manually during conventional autopsy. A systematic digital documentation would be desirable, especially for the external examination of wounds, which is becoming more relevant for legal medicine analysis. For this purpose, RGB surface scanning has been introduced. While a manual full surface scan using a handheld camera is timeconsuming and operator dependent, floor or ceiling mounted robotic systems require substantial space and a dedicated room. Hence, we consider whether a mobile robotic system can be used for external documentation. Methods: We develop a mobile robotic system that enables full-body RGB-D surface scanning. Our work includes a detailed configuration space analysis to identify the environmental parameters that need to be considered to successfully perform a surface scan. We validate our findings through an experimental study in the lab and demonstrate the system's application in a legal medicine environment. Results: Our configuration space analysis shows that a good trade-off between coverage and time is reached with three robot base positions, leading to a coverage of 94.96 %. Experiments validate the effectiveness of the system in accurately capturing body surface geometry with an average surface coverage of 96.90 +- 3.16 % and 92.45 +- 1.43 % for a body phantom and actual corpses, respectively. Conclusion: This work demonstrates the potential of a mobile robotic system to automate RGB-D surface scanning in legal medicine, complementing the use of post-mortem CT scans for inner documentation. Our results indicate that the proposed system can contribute to more efficient and autonomous legal medicine documentation, reducing the need for manual intervention.