Design and development of flexible baseline-based distributed position and orientation measurement system

Multi-node mission loads has become more and more popular in the application of aerial remote sensing system, which both rely on high accuracy motion parameter information to conduct motion compensation to improve imaging accuracy. To this end, distributed position and orientation system (DPOS) has been proposed to provide multi-node high accuracy motion information, which is based on rigid baseline to proceed transfer alignment from its master system to slave system. But in the practical case, influenced by multiple external disturbance, the lever arm between loads suffers from flexible deformation, and the followed flexible deformation error will degrade the performance of DPOS obviously. In order to estimate the flexible deformation error, a novel flexible baseline-based position and orientation measurement system assisted by fiber bragg grating (FBG) sensors is designed and developed, which integrates the properties of FBG and the existing rigid baseline DPOS, the flexible baseline deformation can be estimated effectively to improve the motion parameter accuracy.