Inertial Motion Tracking Technology for Inserting Humans into a Networked Synthetic Environment

摘要

A novel hybrid inertial and magnetic human body motion tracking system was developed for inserting humans into virtual environments. The system is composed of two main components: in-house designed MARG sensors and a complementary data processing filter. Each MARG sensor is a nine-axis sensor consisting of a three-axis magnetometer a three-axis angular rate sensor: and a three-axis accelerometer and offers one-degree accuracy which is sufficient for human body motion tracking. The complementary filter is based on quaternions avoiding orientation singularities associated with Euler angles, and significantly reducing the computational requirements by not using any trigonometric functions. The filter is designed to take advantage of complementary information provided by high frequency angular rate data and low frequency magnetometer and accelerometer data. A tracking system with three MARG sensors was prototyped and demonstrated. Testing results indicated that the system offers superior performance compared with commercially available products. A patent on the MARG tracking system was filed in October 2001.