A 3-D position and attitude measurement system using laser scanners and corner cubes

This work proposes a new method for measuring the position and attitude of an autonomous land vehicle navigating in a rough terrain. The measurement system proposed here provides precise information on position and heading quickly and continuously. It consists of two laser scanners mounted on the vehicle and corner cubes placed in the environment as landmarks. Each laser scanner rotates a fan-shaped laser beam for detecting the retro-reflections by the corner cubes and measures their azimuth angles. This work presents the principle of measurement and method of positional and attitude estimation. Simulation results are given to show the accuracy of the proposed method.