CultLab3D to CultArm3D - The First Autonomous, Robot-assisted, Color-faithful 3D Digitization Technologies for Cultural Heritage Collections

The European Cultural Heritage Strategy for the 21st century has spurred demand for fast and efficient 3D digitization technologies for cultural heritage artifacts. Unlike widely automated 2D digitization, 3D often required significant manual intervention. This is no longer the case. Our pioneering efforts have made large scale 3d digitization easy-to-use, fast and economic, as well as robust and reliable. In 2012 at the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research IGD the Department for Cultural Heritage Digitization was created and entrusted with the mission to develop the first reference system for autonomous 3D digitization. Its first project was CultLab3D funded by the German Federal Ministry of Economy and Energy affairs. A very early version of the CultLab3D digitization pipeline was then presented at the first Digital Heritage conference in Marseille in 2013 winning the technical proficiency award. In 2018 we were recognized with the EU Prize for Cultural Heritage / Europa Nostra Award. In due course of our research and after many lessons learned evaluating our technologies with numerous cultural heritage institutions worldwide, we have constantly improved and refined them. As a result, in 2023/2024 we created a spinoff company Verus Digital GmbH which now commercializes the CultArm3D technology and offers 3d digitization services to cultural heritage institutions. In addition, we also successfully managed to perform technology transfer to other domains benefiting from autonomous 3d digitization of arbitrary objects, such as the dismantlement of nuclear powerplants resulting in the first autonomous ultrahigh-pressure waterjet decontamination system operational since 2024 at RWE Nuclear GmbH in Biblis, Germany and awarded the EU Innovation Prize on Nuclear Waste Management 2022. Our paper provides an overview of the challenges and developments from the first autonomous, robotassisted 3D digitization technologies to their current state (see Figure 1), ensuring completeness and repeatable high quality of resulting 3D models for objects of arbitrary shapes and a wide range of materials, as well as the automated generation of by-products such as decimated web, AR, 3D print models or rendered videos. We conclude with a discussion of current and future lines of research to further improve the capabilities of the CultArm3D platform.