[TaylorAlexander]

Great project Daniel! Really cool that you're venturing out of software land. Looks like you would have learned a lot about Arduino from this!

I've recently been playing around with 3D scanning, but using photogrammetry. You could record high res video or take high res photographs of a scene, and then use the program Meshroom or colmap to convert those photos (cut video in to 1fps stills) in to a 3D model. If you want to play around with dense scans that may be worth a try.

Doing it with a LIDAR is nice though because it is the correct scale, something photogrammetry inherently fails at without additional sensors.

I'm a very project oriented learner, and I'm always making things and learning stuff and then pivoting with my projects. I've been doing that for 20 years and it's great because I learn whatever the hell I want and after I get good at it I can get a job in that area. So keep up the hardware projects! This one looks great.

[dvoros]

Thank you very much for the kind words and the recommendation! Adding a camera is probably the next step I'll take. Adding color information to the point cloud would be a huge plus. I haven't tried photogrammetry before but I assume it works best if things are captured from multiple angles so my current setup of taking measurements from a single point isn't the best fit. But maybe combining scans from different standpoints...

[TaylorAlexander]

Yes probably best to experiment with photogrammetry separately and then think about how to integrate it. But it can be difficult to ensure you got 100% coverage so programming a full scan with your gimbal could be useful. You would want to do it from multiple locations. But I’ve found just handheld 4k video from a phone is a great place to start. You can extract frames from video easily with this script I wrote:

https://github.com/tlalexander/rover_video_scripts/blob/mast...

[fxtentacle]

In my experience, photogrammetry had issues with transparent and reflective surfaces, so wooden floor or brushes metal kitchen appliances wouldn't work well.

As for the scale, you can always just bring a measurement stick and place it on the floor so that you have an object with known sizes to use to calibrate the scale after the 3d recognition.

The gold standard in my opinion is a laser pattern protector in combination with photogrammetry. That way, you can project a pattern onto objects that would otherwise be too uniform in color.

[regularfry]

Lasers will also have problems with anything reflective, or transparent to the wrong wavelengths.

[secretsatan]

We've been working on using the new iOS devices and integrating their LiDAR data into our photogrammetry pipeline. We've also developed an app that gets good scale using only photogrammetry and AR functionality