Scanning Bot: Efficient Scan Planning using Panoramic Cameras

Abstract

Panoramic RGB-D cameras enable high-quality 3D scene reconstruction but require manual viewpoint selection and physical camera transportation, making the process time-consuming and tedious—especially for novice users. Key challenges include ensuring sufficient feature overlap between camera views and planning collision-free paths. We propose a fully autonomous scan planner that generates efficient and collision-free tours with adequate viewpoint overlap to address these issues. Experiments in both synthetic and real-world environments show that our method achieves up to 99% scan coverage and is up to three times faster than state-of-the-art view planning approaches.