For a mobile robot it is a natural task to build a 3D model of its environment. Such a model is not only useful for planning robot actions but also to provide a remote human surveillant a realistic visualization of the robot’s state with respect to the environment. Acquiring 3D models of environments is also an important task on its own with many possible applications like creating virtual interactive walkthroughs or as basis for 3D-TV.
In this paper we present our method to acquire a 3D model using a mobile robot that is equipped with a laser scanner and a panoramic camera. The method is based on calculating dense depth maps for panoramic images using pairs of panoramic images taken from different positions using stereo matching. Traditional 2D-SLAM using laser-scan-matching is used to determine the needed camera poses. To receive high-quality results we use a high-quality stereo matching algorithm – the graph cut method. We describe the necessary modifications to handle panoramic images and specialized post-processing methods.