Commercial Laser Scanner vs wiiCam, or parallax Laser.

rwgast_logicdesign

So I was just browsing robotshop and found this

http://www.robotshop.com/hokuyo-urg-04lx-laser-rangefinder-1.html

It looks pretty cool, but im just not understanding why the price is so hi. You can put the 100 dollar parallax laser on a pan/tilt, or even better a wiicam, and do 3d object scanning. Does anyone know what the deal with these are, what do they have to offer for the price?

SRLM

Look at the specifications: they are hardly comparable:

Hokuyo:
* 100msec/scan
* 20mm to 4m (1mm resolution)
* 240° arc (0.36° angular resolution)

Parallax on servo:
* 660000msec/scan
* 150mm to 2.4m
* 240° arc (0.36° angular resolution)

rwgast_logicdesign

Ok well a I was more talking about a wii cam I guess. Im not sure what its angular resolution is but it operates at 200khz, and can see about 10ft away which is close to the 4 meters of the hokuyo. All though I just realized this thing scans a 240 degree area of site at once instead of panning a straight line across a plane right? Not sure if that made sense, I guess what im saying is thing can see 240 degrees without moving and returns the corresponding object distances in the 240 degrees every 100msecs? So basically you can read 240 points every 100msecs?

SRLM

Do you have a link to the WiiCam? In any case, it's not comparable either since it will require significant processor resources at a minimum (and it operates on different, and sometimes mutually exclusive, principles).

The Hokuyo scanner is a 2D scanner. Imagine a pizza: that is the scanning area. The pizza isn't complete: it's only 3/4 complete (1/4 missing). Of the remaining pizza, it's cut 660 times with the pizza cutter. The output of the Hokuyo sensor is essentially the distance to an object along each of those cuts. It doesn't make any assumptions about "objects".

You should really look at the links on the Hokuyo page...