A Composite Pointing Error Analysis of a Five-Axis Flight/Target Motion Simulator with an Infrared Scene Projector

摘要

As seekers increase in resolution and accuracy, test facilities must satisfy more stringent accuracy specifications. Besides imparting high-fidelity motion, the 5-axis flight motion table (FMS) must also report higher position accuracies to represent the true axis position. Various errors combine to form the composite position accuracy. The various errors such as axis wobble, axis orthogonality, and axis position readout are individually measured to ensure the simulator conforms to the accuracy specifications. However, it is difficult to experimentally determine the table orientation errors over the simulator motion space. The vector line from the seeker to the target - called the "pointing vector" - includes all the individual system errors. Some errors are deterministic and some are random. The generally accepted means to analyze this problem is to assume each error is independent and random. The RSS (root-sum-squared) Method of calculating the pointing error is one accepted protocol of combining random errors. This paper discusses the error sources, the error characteristics, and the typical values for a five-axis flight/target motion system.