This paper dwells upon the promising 3D technology for mobile robots and automation industry. The first part of the paper describes the design details of our own 3D Time of Flight (TOF) scanning system based on 2D laser range finder. The second part presents a specific segmentation technique for 3D outdoor urban environments by the common detection of plane models. In a few words, the technique separates the raw data into sparse and dense points, followed by the segmentation of the dense points into urban background and foreground objects. In the end we present some experimental results of real-world data-sets taken from the repository of the Leibniz University in Hannover, Germany.