This week I continued working on simulating the data we would get for the laser projection. I tweaked a few parameters and also got the animation to work. Now, Blender can either render a whole video or render a bunch of images with each frame of the video being saved as an image instead. We will use the set of images with a known rotation angle shift per image (360 degrees / number of frames) as input to our scanning software.
Here is the video of the rotating laser scan, where the laser is projecting from the right side: https://youtu.be/7rv-rFpyDcM
I updated the block diagram for our system – note that all the physical components have been removed, and the controllers are also removed. We have Blender-simulated data instead for the input, and we will likely use a Django web app for ease of running Python with a simple web interface rather than using some Python GUI like Tkinter which would take more unnecessary time to implement. Chakara and I are both experienced in developing web applications so using Django is more of a choice of saving time in a portion that isn’t entirely essential to the project.
Moving forward, I will finalize the laser scan by adding a platform and also calibrating the angle between the camera and the laser, as well as the height of these two items. I will also start finding more objects that fit our project, and will look to start implementing some of the code to perform outlier removal on the point cloud.