Dynamic Metrology Performance Measurement of a Six Degrees-of-Freedom Tracking System Used in Smart Manufacturing

Multi-camera motion capture systems are commercially available and typically are used in the entertainment industry to track human motions for video gaming and movies. These systems are proving useful as ground truth measurement systems to assess the performance of robots, autonomous ground vehicles, and assembly tasks in smart manufacturing. In order to be used as ground truth, the accuracy of the motion capture system must be at least ten times better than a given system under test. This chapter creates an innovate artifact and test method to measure the accuracy of a given motion capture system. These measurements will then be used to assess the performance of the motion capture system and validate that it can be used as ground truth. The motion capture system will then serve as ground truth for evaluating the performance of an automatic guided vehicle (AGV) with an onboard robot arm (mobile manipulator) and for evaluating the performance of robotic workstation assembly tasks that utilize robot arms and hands.