[danpat]

I've had some success with some of the off-the-shelf laser distance measurement modules, like the ones Bosch sell at big-box hardware stores:

https://www.boschtools.com/us/en/boschtools-ocs/laser-measur...

They have 1-2mm accuracy and quite good precision, particularly if your environment is stable (temperature, movement, lighting). These modules use an interferometry approach rather than time of flight to achieve their accuracy.

Several of them have a Bluetooth interface which you could reverse-engineer. The work then would be creating a turret to rotate the unit around a known centerpoint and take a bunch of samples. It'd be slow, but it works.

There are also a bunch of modules available on Alibaba for a few tens of dollars that have serial interfaces and seem to have similar performance - they often have 10s of Hz sample rates, so you could speed up scanning quite a lot. They exhibit similar accuracy to the boxed units I've bought, but require you to be comfortable with things like SPI and soldering.