ArcheOS Hypatia and Archeorobotics: ROS for 3D dynamic documentations

Dynamic 3D documentation is a technique we are using more and more in professional archaeology. It can be useful to map in a very fast way any kind of earth-moving work during negative archaeological controls (from wide open area to small trenches, like we did here) or to record in real-time archaeological evidences and layers during a normal excavation (like the video below).

Using this methodology during an ordinary project allows us to perform the segmentation of the 3D model directly on the field (within the software Cloud Compare), dividing each layer of palimpsestic documentation (we spoke about this problem during our presentation at the CHNT conference 2016). This solution avoid long post-processing operations, and it is ideal to spare time and money in low-budget archaeological investigations. For this reason we are evaluating the possibility to insert ROS (Robot Operating System) in ArcheOS Hypatia.

I hope to give you soon good news about the release of the next version of ArcheOS. In the meantime stay tuned to follow our research in testing new Open Source and Free Software. Like always, if you want to help in the development, just contact us in one of our channels: FaceBook, YouTube or Blogger. 

Have a nice day! 

ArcheOS Hypatia Virtual Globe: Cesium

Hi all,

I am starting here a series of short post to show some of the features of the main software selected for ArcheOS Hypatia, trying to explain the reasons of these choices. The first category I'll deal with is the one of Virtual Globes. Among the many available options of FLOSS, one of the applications which meets the needs of archaeology is certainly Cesium. This short video shows its capability of import geolocalized 3D complex models, which is a very important possibility for archaeologist. In this example I imported in Cesium the 3D model (done with Structure from Motion) of a a small boat which lies on the bottom of an alpine lake (more info in this post).

Soon I'll post other short videos to show other features of Cesium. Have a nice evening!

ROS and professional archaeology

It is a long time since we wrote something in this blog, but (like every year) the excavation season leaves us few time for research. For this reason, today I want to break our silence and show some results of our latest studies regarding archeorobotics (the use and development of robotic devices in archaeology).

If you are a regular reader of ATOR, you probably know that since 2012 we are working on optical sensor to achieve a real-time 3D documentation of archaeological evidences (or any kind of data we need to acquire during our projects). Since we started to work on different kind of drones (UAV, ROV, etc...), we discover the nice universe of ROS (Robot Operating System) and SLAM (Simultaneous Localization And Mapping) algorithms. In this post we summarized our research on this topic, focusing on the use of Kinect. Currently we already used this techniques on professional projects (like large scale surveys or excavations), adapting the system to work with RGB-D devices (in underground environment or during cloudy days) or stereocameras (with direct sun light conditions). For instance we helped our friend Cristian Boscaro of IUAV to test this technology in order to document the tunnels which connect the domes of the Abbay of S. Giustina in Padua. This evening I will post a video which shows a particular use of ROS and Kinect to solve a technical problem we had on the field today. We were working to assist the excavator in doing a trench for a pipeline near the Sanctuary of S. Romedio, in difficult logistic condition. Despite the absence of archaeological evidences, the Superintendence asked us to document the track of the trench, since often what is realize during the execution of this kind of work is different from what is planned in the map. Due to the fact that too few hours were left to accomplish a documentation with GPS and total station and that this strategy would have been pretty tricky (inside the gorge of the river S. Romedio) and not so accurate (for the scattering effect of the wood), we decided to use SLAM to get a real time 3D documentation of the track and later to georeference the result on the LIDAR data which the Autonomous Province of Trento releases freely. The video below shows the final result, which completely satisfies the (high) archaeological tolerance of this project.

That's all for today! Have a nice evening!