This paper presents a vision system designed for an underwater robot to facilitate measuring the distance to an inspected surface and its orientation with respect to the robot. The system uses a set of laser modules to project a rectangular dot pattern on the inspected surface. The vision system is used to measure the dots’ locations in the 3D space and calculate the distance to the surface, together with the pitch angle and the yaw angle of the camera. A novel calibration procedure is presented, which allows for constructing high resolution camera-laser systems, without requiring a perfect alignment of laser beams and camera optical axis. An underwater vision system simulation environment, based on open-source software, is also introduced and extensively used to test the developed algorithms. The experimental results, obtained in a laboratory tank and a pool, confirm high performance of the system.

本文介绍了一种为水下机器人设计的视觉系统，以方便测量到被检查表面的距离及其相对于机器人的方向。该系统使用一组激光模块在被检测表面上投射一个矩形点图案。视觉系统用于测量点在 3D 空间中的位置并计算到表面的距离，以及相机的俯仰角和偏航角。提出了一种新的校准程序，它允许构建高分辨率相机激光系统，而不需要激光束和相机光轴的完美对齐。还引入了基于开源软件的水下视觉系统仿真环境，并广泛用于测试所开发的算法。实验结果，