The displacement estimation error back-propagation (DEEP) method for a multiple structural displacement monitoring system

Abstract

Visually servoed paired structured light system (ViSP) has been found to be useful in estimating 6-DOF relative displacement. The system is composed of two screens facing each other, each with one or two lasers, a 2-DOF manipulator and a camera. The displacement between two sides is estimated by observing positions of the projected laser beams and rotation angles of the manipulators. To apply the system to massive structures, the whole area should be partitioned and each ViSP module is placed in each partition in a cascaded manner. The estimated displacement between adjoining ViSPs is combined with the next partition so that the entire movement of the structure can be estimated. The multiple ViSPs, however, have a major problem that the error is propagated through the partitions. Therefore, a displacement estimation error back-propagation (DEEP) method which uses Newton–Raphson or gradient descent formulation inspired by the error back-propagation algorithm is proposed. In this method, the estimated displacement from the ViSP is updated using the error back-propagated from a fixed position. To validate the performance of the proposed method, various simulations and experiments have been performed. The results show that the proposed method significantly reduces the propagation error throughout the multiple modules.