Hands-Free Heritage: Automated 3D Scanning for Cultural Heritage Digitization
This addresses the need for automated, expert-free digitization of cultural heritage artefacts, though it appears to be an incremental improvement on existing robotic scanning approaches.
The paper tackles the problem of manual intervention in cultural heritage 3D scanning by developing an automated two-robot system that coordinates scanning and tray-handling robots. The system achieves significantly lower Chamfer Distance and higher F-score compared to baseline methods, improving geometric accuracy and digitization efficiency.
High-fidelity 3D scanning is essential for preserving cultural heritage artefacts, supporting documentation, analysis, and long-term conservation. However, conventional methods typically require specialized expertise and manual intervention to maintain optimal scanning conditions and coverage. We present an automated two-robot scanning system that eliminates the need for handheld or semi-automatic workflows by combining coordinated robotic manipulation with high-resolution 3D scanning. Our system parameterizes the scanning space into distinct regions, enabling coordinated motion planning between a scanner-equipped robot and a tray-handling robot. Optimized trajectory planning and waypoint distribution ensure comprehensive surface coverage, minimize occlusions, and balance reconstruction accuracy with system efficiency. Experimental results show that our approach achieves significantly lower Chamfer Distance and higher F-score compared to baseline methods, offering superior geometric accuracy, improved digitization efficiency, and reduced reliance on expert operators.