Motion estimation of unknown rigid body under no external forces and moments

Abstract

This paper presents a method to estimate and to predict general three-dimensional motions of an unknown rigid body under no external forces and moments using visual information, which is applicable to autonomous space robotic missions. Four parameters of dynamics and a reference coordinate frame to describe the motion are computed based on the Euler's equation of motion from a sequence of angular velocity vectors extracted from difference of images. Through computer simulations for various kinds of motions the effectiveness and limitation of this method are discussed.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>