Position and orientation measurement of a fast moving multibody system in ground tests

A vision based method for position and orientation measurement of a multi body system is described. The measurement procedure comprises a combination of modern image analysis techniques such as Inverse Perspective Mapping, Normalized Cross Correlation, and Kalman filter tracking of multiple markers. The described approach is applied to measure the rapid motion of a complex system such as a deployable antenna for space applications and can easily be employed for other applications. A key feature of the described work is a detailed analysis of the main uncertainty sources and of their effects on the measurement results.