UK Atomic Energy Authority, Remote Applications in Challenging Environments, Culham Science Centre, Abingdon, Oxfordshire OX14 3DB, United Kingdom.

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Abstract—Remote handling systems are commonly used for decommissioning and maintenance of hazardous environments, especially in the nuclear sector. The necessity for a more realistic and accurate user interaction with the remote environment has led research towards the usage of immersive technologies such as augmented and virtual reality. In order for this to succeed, the state of the remote environment needs to be known accurately at all times. Information gathered using RGB-D cameras can serve this purpose. The high accuracy and density of data retrieved by these devices provide an extraordinary insight of the remote environment but can represent a burden on the communication channels. This paper addresses two point cloud compression techniques based on kd-trees and octrees for point cloud data transmission within a Robot Operative System (ROS) communications middleware.

Index Terms—Kd-tree, octree, point cloud compression, remote handling, ROS.

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Cite: Salvador Pacheco-Gutierrez, Ipek Caliskanelli, Robert Skilton, "Point Cloud Compression and Transmission for Remote Handling Applications," Journal of Software vol. 16, no. 1, pp. 14-23, 2021.

Copyright © 2021 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0)