Orientation for Distributed Measurement System Using Improved Bundle Adjustment and Lie Algebra

Distributed measurement system (DMS) has shown great potential in pose measurement for the mobile target. One essential problem encountered in global measurement with DMS is that the relative poses among measurement nodes are unknown. In this article, the problem of orientation for DMS is formulated and a novel method for solving the relative poses is proposed. An original omnidirectional cooperative target is designed to assist in shortening the orientation time. The objective function is constructed on the Lie algebra, and an analytical method is proposed to solve the initial values. The iterative optimization is converted to the solution to improved bundle adjustment, and an adaptive penalty factor is defined to balance the terms to be optimized. The solvability analysis is also given and discussed in detail. Simulation and practical experiments are conducted to verify the superiority of the proposed method. It is observed that after a representative DMS is oriented by the proposed method, the pose error of measuring the mobile robot with the DMS is reduced by 81.98% and 59.08%, respectively, compared with two other state-of-the-art methods.