Development of a camera-aided optical mouse sensors based localization system for a free floating planar robot

Ground-based testbeds have been widely used for the development and verification on the ground of algorithms and space instrumentation. This paper presents the development of a contactless measurement system to estimate the planar motion of a free floating robot in the development phase of a ground-based testbed translational module. The contactless system is used to estimate both position and azimuth of the translational module relying on high-rate data, provided by an optical mouse sensors system, and low-rate measurements, provided by an external monocular vision system. An extended formulation of the Kalman filter is used to obtain a reliable estimation of the robot motion by fusing the two sets of measrements. Several tests are carried out to evaluate the accuracy of the system in different operative conditions and recommendations on how to improve the estimation accuracy are given.