Automatic Alignment of Motion Capturing System Markers to a Small Differential Drive Robot’s Position and Heading Angle

Marker-based motion capturing systems are effective in tracking a robot only if the marker configuration is somehow aligned with the robot’s body. To overcome the manual alignment, in this paper we propose an automatic procedure for a small differential drive ground robot. The procedure requires that the robot travels along an arbitrary curved trajectory. The parameters describing the relative position between the marker configuration and the robot’s body are estimated. Once the parameters are known, they can be used to compute the robot’s center and its heading angle. The effectiveness of the procedure is illustrated by an experiment and the results showing that the accuracy of the robot center position exceeds the accuracy of the motion capturing measurements of the markers’ positions.