Smart Prism with Tilt Compensation for CAN bus on Mobile Machinery Using Robotic Total Stations
🤖 AI Summary
This study addresses the significant horizontal offset between conventional prism measurement points and actual points of interest caused by roll and pitch motions of mobile machinery in dynamic field environments, which compromises centimeter-level trajectory validation accuracy. To overcome this limitation, the authors propose an intelligent prism prototype that integrates an IMU with a robotic total station prism for the first time. Built around an STM32H7 microcontroller and a Murata SCH16T IMU, the system employs an adaptive complementary filter to estimate attitude angles and applies lever-arm calibration along with coordinate transformations to compensate the measured point pose in real time, outputting a virtual position signal via CAN bus. Experimental results demonstrate that, under a 1.07 m lever arm and up to 60° of artificial tilt, the system achieves a 3D root-mean-square error of 2.9–23.6 mm, substantially enhancing reference measurement performance for high-precision navigation systems in dynamic scenarios.
Application Category
📝 Abstract
Accurate reference trajectories are required to validate autonomous agricultural robots and highly automated off-road vehicles under real-world field conditions. In practice, robotic total stations provide millimeter-level prism center coordinates, but the point of interest on the vehicle is typically displaced by a lever arm, ranging from decimeters to multiple meters. Roll and pitch motions, as typically observed in off-road machinery, therefore introduce horizontal point of interest errors far exceeding the measurement accuracy of robotic total stations observations. This paper presents the design, implementation, and validation of a Smart Prism prototype that augments a robotic total station prism with an inertial measurement unit to enable real-time tilt compensation. The prototype integrates an STM32H7 microcontroller and a Murata SCH16T-series IMU and estimates roll and pitch angles using an adaptive complementary filter. The tilt-compensated point of interest coordinates are obtained by transforming a calibrated lever arm from the body frame into the navigation frame and combining it with robotic total station prism positions. To support vehicle-side integration, the system can transmit prism and tilt-compensated point of interest coordinates on the Controller Area Network bus, allowing the point of interest to be treated as a virtual position sensor (e.g., co-located with a rear-axle reference point). Experiments with a fixed ground reference point, using a prism to point of interest lever arm of approximately 1.07m and manual roll/pitch excursions of up to 60 deg, yield three-dimensional root-mean-square errors between 2.9mm and 23.6mm across five test series. The results demonstrate that IMU-based tilt compensation enables reference measurements suitable for validating centimeter-level navigation systems under dynamic field conditions.
Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
tilt compensation
lever arm
robotic total station
off-road machinery
point of interest
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
Smart Prism
tilt compensation
robotic total station
IMU
CAN bus
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