Form-Fitting, Large-Area Sensor Mounting for Obstacle Detection

2026-03-24

AI Summary

This work addresses the challenge of precise sensor calibration required for large-scale robotic perception by proposing a high-coverage, calibration-free obstacle detection method. The approach leverages computer-aided design (CAD) to procedurally generate “skin units” that conform to the robot’s non-developable surfaces, enabling the integration of arbitrarily sized circuit boards to fix sensor positions with known spatial coordinates. By combining CAD, 3D-printed structural elements, and time-of-flight (ToF) imaging arrays, the method successfully constructs near-field obstacle point clouds on a Franka Research 3 robotic arm. This enables extensive, efficient perception without prior calibration, significantly streamlining deployment and enhancing system practicality.

Technology Category

• Intelligent Robots: Multimodal Perception & Sensor Fusion
• Computer Vision: Vision for Robotics & Autonomous Driving
• Machine Learning: Calibration & Uncertainty Quantification

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Experiences and lessons learnt from Web-based algorithms and system deployments
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Cost models of using LLMs in production systems
• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements

Abstract

We introduce a low-cost method for mounting sensors onto robot links for large-area sensing coverage that does not require the sensor's positions or orientations to be calibrated before use. Using computer aided design (CAD), a robot skin covering, or skin unit, can be procedurally generated to fit around a nondevelopable surface, a 3D surface that cannot be flattened into a 2D plane without distortion, of a robot. The skin unit embeds mounts for printed circuit boards of any size to keep sensors in fixed and known locations. We demonstrate our method by constructing point cloud images of obstacles within the proximity of a Franka Research 3 robot's operational environment using an array of time of flight (ToF) imagers mounted on a printed skin unit and attached to the robot arm.

Problem

• sensor mounting
• large-area sensing
• obstacle detection
• robot skin
• nondevelopable surface

Innovation

• robot skin
• nondevelopable surface
• sensor mounting
• large-area sensing
• ToF imaging