Spatial Object Tracking System Based on Linear Optical Sensor Arrays

This paper presents a low-cost novel motion tracking system using linear optical sensor arrays supplemented by a 9DOF inertial measurement unit. Each pair of the linear sensor modules is capable of tracking the 2D location of an active infrared LED light source (marker). The presented tracking system combines two of these modules to realize spatial position tracking of the LED light source. The proposed system efficiently amalgamates inertial data with optical tracking estimates to extract attitude, minimize power requirement, and improve positional accuracy. The tracking system enables high-speed, high-accuracy, and low-cost position and attitude tracking for a wide range of applications. The detailed hardware design and performance evaluation experiments of this approach are also reported. The performance of the proposed tracking system was evaluated by measuring the tracking error with respect to known trajectories of the LED light source from different distances.