Position Measurement Of Moving Objects Using A Robotic Total Station

Abstract

This paper attempts to evaluate an emerging use case for Robotic Total Stations (RTSs)as a tracking and guidance system for small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), especially appliedto scenarios where conventional means of navigation (such as GNSS) are insufficient or completelyunavailable. The focus is on indoors environments, where a constantly tracking total station couldpotentially be used to provide the UAV with a reference coordinate frame together with its immediateposition within these coordinates. Preliminary experiments have been performed to evaluate the capabilitiesof two available RTSs, the Trimble S7 and S9 HP series, both controlled by a TSC7 controller.A Raspberry Pi mini-computer was used to timestamp specific events during the motion of a targettracked by the RTS. The Pi was synchronized with the RTS through Precision Time Protocol (PTP).This enabled direct timestamp comparison for time delay evaluation.