Terrestrial Laser Scanning (TLS) is a reliable method for collecting point clouds. Two very important aspects in capturing point clouds using TLS are “effectiveness” and “efficiency”. Effective and efficient data collection can be achieved through a priori planning. Effectiveness deals with quality of the dataset i.e. considering the criteria to ensure that the acquired point clouds are appropriate for the given task. Completeness, accuracy, and points’ density are the main criteria in this regard. Efficiency of data collection mainly copes with the time which is required for scanning the object of interest. This is directly related to number of stations (scan positions) and is also constrained with quality parameters and environmental aspects.
Scan planning could be utilized in different applications, and scenarios for scanning various objects (Aryan et al., 2021; Wujanz et al., 2016). However, it would be even more important and challenging when other parameters like accessibility of the object are also limited. One example is scanning the objects which are manufactured using additive manufacturing in construction (AMC). Since 2020 IGP is involved in a Collaborative Research Center on AMC (TRR277) where one of the main tasks within sub-project C06 is scanning the 3D printed objects in different printing epochs using TLS (Maboudi et al., 2020; Mawas et al., 2022). In this short video and also in Figure 1, a new setup where a TLS is mounted on the printing robot is demonstrated.
Regarding scan planning, one main difference in AMC with respect to most of the other applications is that the designed models of the objects to be printed, are already available. Employing this valuable information, we can compute the optimum scanning positions before the manufacturing process. Another opportunity when the TLS is installed on the robot is that scanning parts of the objects which are not visible using classic scanning approach (mounting TLS on the tripod) would be possible. Furthermore, after computing the optimum scan positions, printing robot can bring the scanner to the computed stations, accurately.
After a literature review on the existing TLS scan planning approaches and open source tools, the main research questions of this topic are as follows:
Which parameters that affect the quality of the collected data, could be considered in scan planning?
The objectives of the project are defined as follows: