Autonomous Mobile Scanning Systems for the Digitization of Buildings: A Review

Mobile scanning systems are being used more and more frequently in industry, construction, and artificial intelligent applications. More particularly, autonomous scanning plays an essential role in the field of the automatic creation of 3D models of building. This paper presents a critical review of current autonomous scanning systems, discussing essential aspects that determine the efficiency and applicability of a scanning system in real environments. Some important issues, such as data redundancy, occlusion, initial assumptions, the complexity of the scanned scene, and autonomy, are analysed in the first part of the document, while the second part discusses other important aspects, such as pre-processing, time requirements, evaluation, and opening detection. A set of representative autonomous systems is then chosen for comparison, and the aforementioned characteristics are shown together in several illustrative tables. Principal gaps, limitations, and future developments are presented in the last section. The paper provides the reader with a general view of the world of autonomous scanning and emphasizes the difficulties and challenges that new autonomous platforms should tackle in the future.