A Method for Measuring the Absolute Position and Attitude Parameters of a Moving Rigid Body Using a Monocular Camera

Abstract

To verify the dynamic model of a paddy-field laser grader and solve the problem of the unstable high-speed operation of the grader, a method for measuring the absolute pose parameters of a moving rigid body using a monocular camera is proposed. The proposed method does not require calibration beforehand. Using more than six non-coplanar control points symmetrically arranged in the rigid-body and world coordinate systems, the matrices of rotation and translation between the camera and two coordinate systems are obtained and the absolute pose of the rigid body is measured. In this paper, formulas of the absolute pose measurement of a moving rigid body are deduced systematically and the complete implementation is presented. Position and attitude measurement experiments carried out on a three-axis precision turntable show that the average absolute error in the attitude angle of a moving rigid body measured by an uncalibrated camera at different positions changes by no more than 0.2 degrees. An analysis of the three-dimensional coordinate errors of the centroid of a moving rigid body shows little deviation in measurements taken at the three camera positions, with the maximum deviation of the average absolute error being 0.53 cm and the maximum deviation of the standard deviation being 0.66 cm. The proposed method can measure the absolute pose of a rigid body and is insensitive to the position of the camera in the measurement process. This work thus provides guidance for the repeated measurement of the absolute pose of a moving rigid body using a monocular camera.