Pose measurement for fighter empennage based on string sensors

A follow-up control system is designed to fulfil the fatigue test experiment of fighter empennage. To measure the distortion of empennage, a cost-effective simple rapid measurement method is put forward to permit precise pose measurement on the basis of string sensors. Two sets of string sensor measurement systems are mounted on the base and the vibration table, respectively. The joint coordinates of the measure system composed of six string sensors are determined by a coordinate measurement machine (CMM). Using the forward kinematics, inverse kinematics of Stewart table and quaternion, the string sensor measurement system gets the pose of empennage after the high-frequency component arising from vibration table is filtered by a low-pass filter. Compared with the computation data obtained from CMM, it is demonstrated that the measurement method on pose measurement by string sensor is valid and convenient. All two string sensor measurement systems can run effectively in the fatigue test experiment of fighter empennage.