Society of Robots - Robot Forum

Electronics => Electronics => Topic started by: JesseWelling on January 27, 2008, 12:16:29 PM

Title: New type of Laser Range finder.
Post by: JesseWelling on January 27, 2008, 12:16:29 PM
Very high price I bet  :'(
"3-D flash Ladar" From what I can grok it flashes an IR laser array and then uses an IR camera to judge the distance... but I only did a quick read though on the mechanism so take that with a grain of salt  :P
http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/24348
http://www.advancedscientificconcepts.com/
Title: Re: New type of Laser Range finder.
Post by: SmAsH on January 27, 2008, 03:14:36 PM
wow thats cool. i would use that if i had $$


~smash
Title: Re: New type of Laser Range finder.
Post by: Dank55 on January 27, 2008, 07:30:18 PM
What I could find on ASC's site and the press release didn't seem relevant to what we're doing here.  A 5000' range is probably useful for the army, but $100 laser rangefinders like the one I mentioned earlier that you can pick up on Amazon would work better for us.  I was disappointed that their site didn't mention any prices, too.

Dan
#wikiversity on irc.freenode.net
Title: Re: New type of Laser Range finder.
Post by: airman00 on January 27, 2008, 07:38:11 PM
anybody know of any tutorials on hacking those 100 dollar laser rangefinders?
Title: Re: New type of Laser Range finder.
Post by: JesseWelling on January 29, 2008, 12:12:22 AM
True it's state of the art for the army but you should have checked out the white papers to see what kind of techniques they were using... they could give you some ideas...

It was more of a wish list thing anyways.
Title: Re: New type of Laser Range finder.
Post by: JesseWelling on April 02, 2008, 11:27:53 PM
Looks like a consumer version has been made but it's still pricey. http://www.acroname.com/robotics/parts/R309-SR3000.html
So give it 2 years and I bet these will be about 1/2 of the price it is now if it follows moore's law.

One thing kinda bugs me about it though and that's the 'colored depth map' which I hope they aren't using 24 bit color (or more) for that. It would be wiser to transport in 16 bit Gray Scale (one bit per mm), then translate into color on the fast processor instead of waste your bandwidth. But we are talking about USB 2.0 here so maybe you don't have to care...

Even so, I want one  :'(
Title: Re: New type of Laser Range finder.
Post by: Admin on April 06, 2008, 01:46:27 PM
Considering it uses IR, I suspect the range isn't very good on it. It mentioned 3m, but I doubt accuracy is very good that far.

To be honest, I think you could make one yourself for ~$500.