Publication

Performance analysis of a 3-2-1 pose estimation device

Journal Article (2005)

Journal

IEEE Transactions on Robotics

Pages

288-297

Volume

21

Number

3

Doc link

http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TRO.2004.840894

File

Download the digital copy of the doc pdf document

Abstract

This paper deals with the problem of estimating the pose of a moving rigid body by measuring the length of six wires attached to it. Since wires can be seen as extensible legs, this problem is equivalent to that of solving the forward kinematics of a six-degree-of-freedom parallel manipulator. Among all possible locations for the attachments on the moving object, the "3-2-1" configuration is shown to exhibit a large number of favorable properties. The performance analysis of this particular configuration is addressed by finding analytic expressions for the estimated pose covariance matrix and the expected value of the pose estimation error, or bias error, which has been omitted in the previous analysis of wire-based tracking devices. This analysis takes advantage of a formulation for trilateration based on Cayley-Menger determinants, which is mathematically more tractable compared to previous ones, because all terms involved are determinants with geometric meaning. This accommodates a more thorough investigation of the properties of the device.

Categories

robots.

Author keywords

bias error, distance geometry, kinematics singularities, parallel manipulators, pose measuring devices

Scientific reference

F. Thomas, E. Ottaviano, L. Ros and M. Ceccarelli. Performance analysis of a 3-2-1 pose estimation device. IEEE Transactions on Robotics, 21(3): 288-297, 2005.