Technical Report No. 272 - Abstract

Florian Sittel, Jörg Müller, Wolfram Burgard
Computing Velocities and Accelerations from a Pose Time Sequence in Three-dimensional Space

In recent years, small flying robots have become a popular platform in robotics due to their low cost and versatile use. In the context of autonomous navigation, low-cost robots are often equipped with imprecise sensors and actuators and require a proper calibration and carefully designed and learned models. External systems like motion capture cameras usually provide accurate pose estimates for such devices. However, they do not provide the translational and rotational velocities and accelerations of the object. In this paper, we present an algorithm for accurate calculations of the six-dimensional velocity and the six-dimensional acceleration from a possibly noisy pose time sequence. We compute the velocities and accelerations in a regression using Newton's equation of motion as the model function. Thereby, we efficiently decouple the six individual dimensions and account for fictitious forces in the non-inertial body-fixed frame of reference. In simulation and experiments with a real inertial measurement unit (IMU), we show that our algorithm provides accurate velocity and acceleration estimates compared to the reference data.