UC Berkeley Students Create 3D Imaging Backpack
Students at UC Berkeley have come up with a backpack that uses lasers and cameras to create 3D images of the inside just about any building.
Professor Avideh Zakhor and her team of grad students developed the backpack, which uses 1 camera and 1 laser pointing up, down, left, and right to create 3D maps. As the wearer of the backpack walks around and through whatever building they wish to map, the lasers are constantly measuring the distance between the backpack and the walls, creating spacial maps. Simultaneously, the cameras photograph the walls, ceiling, and floor to create texture maps, which are laid over the 3D images to paint the walls and and give texture to surfaces.
They hope to combine their new technology with that of Google Earth to map the inside of buildings, as well as the outside. One of the benefits they speak of in the news coverage reporting the story is that a human can walk in hard to navigate places, like caves or mountains, that robots would be unable to traverse.
Check out the video below to see it in action!
Source: Engadget
