This work addresses 3-D position sensing systems that are based on traingulation methods. Typical applications of such systems are finding the location of the transmitter that may be fixed to an autonomously guided vehicle operating in an enclosed work environment, a robot end-effector, or virtual reality environments. These environments constitute a large working volume, and the receivers have to be fixed in this environment, and their locations known exactly. This paper presents a method to use the system itself to set up an inertial frame of reference and find out the locations of the receivers within this frame. A typical application would be that an AGV carries a set of receivers to a hazardous environement such as a nuclear power plant, places the receivers arbitrarily, carries out the self-installation/calibration procedure, maps out the environment, and begins to function autonomously, the whole procedure being done without human intervention or supervision.
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