CO2 laser radar 3D vision sensor for a mobile robot

Abstract

The laser radar proposed in this paper has good performance as a vision sensor for disaster prevention robots. Due to the good transparency of the CO2 laser, the range information through simulated disaster conditions of smoke, flames, and mist is shown to have little degradation. In order to obtain three-dimensional (3D) information through disaster conditions, such as smoke, flames, and mist, a CO2 laser is used as the light source. The method of range measurement is the detection of the phase shift between the irradiated light continuously modulated in intensity and the light reflected from the target. In the experiments of range measurement by modulation at several different frequencies, we achieved a range resolution of 3 cm for a modulation frequency of 40 MHz. Furthermore, we confirmed that the range accuracy is within ±25cm.