Camera system to detect the orientation of a corner cube in real time

The measurement of the position and orientation of a robot end effector is the most critical issue in calibrating robots. Systems to measure the position are well known but systems to measure the orientation at the same time and with a useful accuracy are not available. A method to do this was developed at the Institute of Flexible Automation (INFA). The new system (LuxWess) bases on a tracking system, a laser beam and image processing techniques. This paper describes the real time image processing system required to record the profile of the laser beam with a sample rate of more than 10000 frames per second and to find the geometry of the corner cube. The detection of the information needed to calculate the orientation of the corner cube with an accuracy of 10 arc seconds is explained. A method to increase the accuracy up to 2 arc seconds is introduced