Vision based navigation using novel optical sensors

Due to the character of the original source materials and the nature of batch digitization, quality control issues may be present in this document. Please report any quality issues you encounter to digital@library.tamu.edu, referencing the URI of the item.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 74).Issued also on microfiche from Lange Micrographics.An optical position measurement system based on Position Sensing Diode technology is tested in its planar version. The system features active target intensity control and signal light modulation. Preliminary calibration procedures are researched and experimented. Algorithms based on Nonlinear Least Squares are derived and simulated to recover the 3 degrees of freedom of a robot moving in a plane, using different integration schemes of the measurement system. An Extended Kalman filter is designed and simulated to identify the robot parameters. Experimentations include real-time recovery of the motion of a telerobot free to float on air bearings, and the actual identification of its dynamical parameters, such as mass, inertia and thrust. In view of the experimental results, some improvements to the position sensing algorithm are proposed and successfully simulated. Overall accuracies in the motion sensing reach sensitivities of 1 part in 500 at update rates of 10Hz, using regular PC computers for computations and data acquisition