REscan Helmet | 2019-2020

Designers: Chunshik Kim and Botond Bognar, Radius Innovation & Development, San Jose, California, USA
Manufacturer: REscan Inc., Menlo Park, California, USA

The head mounted mapping system enables hands free operation, captures large, 1M+ sq.ft. indoor and city scale outdoor pedestrian areas from a human perspective just by walking around. With a combination of 10 high resolution cameras, a multibeam lidar scanner, and other sensors such as GPS, Wifi, GSM receivers, the system captures the built environment and key signal strength information within a spatial context. For visual feedback the operator wears a pair of smart glasses to understand which area was already covered and to check system health. The combination of collecting multifaceted spatial data from a human perspective enables immersive 3D reconstruction for users, and provides a human perspective for machine intelligence applications. Thanks to the helmet formfactor, operators blend into the enterprise workflow and are enabled to scan industrial and commercial spaces during operational hours.

The scanner helmet provides hands-free operation, which is critical when capturing airports, shopping centers, warehouses etc. because the operator cannot carry a handheld scanner for too long and also needs to unlock and open doors during the scanning process. To achieve the hands free capability, it was necessary to miniaturize a sensor fusion including high resolution cameras, lidar, IMU, GPS, Wifi, and GSM receivers previously used in backpack scanners.For system health and to understand which areas were covered the lidar data is streamed to a pair of commercially available smart glasses in real time. In the current version, the system uses a commercially available VR backpack for data and battery storage. This way, the system provides full hands-free operation and constant visual feedback to users, which is critical for large-scale digital mapping.