Real time determination of the location and speed of mobile robots running on non-planar surfaces

The authors present a sensory system called SIREM which is able to provide the position, attitude, and speed of a moving vehicle. The sensor is a turning linear charged coupled device (CCD) camera attached to the vehicle. The camera receives light from sources allocated on the site, and the sensor gives their azimuth and height angles. Software computes the location and speed of the robot at each reading of a beacon. The equations involved in this computation and their solution are presented. The system has been designed to meet the accuracy requirements of civil-engineering: a few millimeters in the vertical direction and down to 0.1 degrees on the attitude angles.<>