WP4 “3D Sea bed mapping and volume measurement” focuses on developing the necessary techniques for performing mapping and 3D modelling of mining targets. The resulting data will provide localization and structural information about the mining targets that will be used for both user-study and automatic classification/identification by the AUV.

During this WP a new underwater laser scanner has been developed, this new device will produce 3D Point Clouds representing the seafloor. This point cloud will produce information about the nodule position, this information would be transmitted to the AUV manipulator for LIBS nodule measurement.

Also the point cloud produced would be triangulated in order to obtain a 3D mesh representing the nodule and enabling the computation of nodule dimensions, volume, …

3D Laser Scanner System and Visual Stereo System (Figure: Coronis)
3D point cloud captured by the scanner projected in the 2D camera plane (Figure: Coronis)
Delaunay triangulation using 2D points (Figure: Coronis)
3D point set meshed in 3D using a lifted 2D triangulation (Figure: Coronis)
3D counterpart of previous 3D point set (Figure: Coronis)