NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS) 20020080262: Motion Tracking System

1 Pages·0.16 MB·English

by  NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

motion Tracking Sysrem
F
or future space operations, NASA is developing avoidance, robot control, process control, precision
technology that would enable a robot resupply machining and surgical probe tracking.
vehicle to automatically dock with and service Shown below, OPAD consists of a camera, a proces-
Earth-orbiting satellites or the International Space sor, a decal set and an optional video display. The decal
Station. is attached to the object to be tracked and the camera is
As part of this program, NASA contracted with trained on it; OPAD then automatically follows the object
Integrated Sensors, Inc. (ISI), Utica, New York for devel- as it moves and provides position/attitude measurements.
opment of a sensor system for controlling the robot vehi- The system uses off-the-shelf components that can be I,
cle during the critical docking phase. During this phase, specially configured for a specific application.
the sensor and tracking system must sense the target IS1 also used the NASA technology as the basis for a
satellite's relative motion and spin so that the robot vehi- spinoff Motion Analysis Workstation, a software package
cle can adjust its own motion to align with the satellite intended to simplify the whole process of video motion
and slowly close until docking is accomplished. analysis. In many applications, high speed cameras are
IS1 successfully developed the NASA system and then used to record the motion of objects of interest on video-
used the sensingtracking technology as the basis of a tape and the tapes are then digitized for further analysis
commercial Object Position and Attitude Determination on a computer. The tracked points' motion is then con-
(OPAD) system that simultaneously tracks an object's lin- verted to user-specific information, such as the force act-
ear and angular movement in all six degrees of freedom. ing upon a dummy during an auto crash test. The latter
Typical OPAD applications include analysis of human step requires manual identification of the points of inter-
limb motion for physical therapy, assembly line posi- est in each frame of video data. 1Sl's Motion Analysis
tion/motion analysis, video positioning of instruments and software obviates that laborious and time-consuming task
tools, auto crash dummy motion analysis, vehicle collision by performing it automatically and accurately.