A Laser-based Volumetric Measurement Approach for Industrial Settings

This work introduces a novel approach to the currently available automatic volumetric measurement systems used in the industry. The proposed system uses a ceiling-mounted laser in tandem with an RGB camera to generate a point cloud of the object that is to be measured, utilizing an adaptation of a structured light scanning approach. The resulting point clouds are post-processed, removing detected structural anomalies to improve the yielded results. The resulting system is then tested and validated on a set of seven objects of various sizes commonly encountered in industrial environments. For these experiments, our approach yields outlier-corrected volumes which are accurate at up to 1% volume divergence. The results differ vastly when going beyond the system’s optimal object size range. The limits of the system are tested for smaller and larger objects, showing a notably higher inaccuracy when tested on relatively small or large objects. Further experiments, exploring optimal laser line distance, lighting conditions, and (in the case of containers) filling degrees are also conducted.