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The Afit Engineer, Volume 5, Issue 4, Graduate School Of Engineering And Management, Air Force Institute Of Technology

AFIT Documents

This issue has a special research feature section by the Autonomy and Navigation Technology Center (ANT) on Demonstration of Alternative Navigation Technologies for Autonomous Aircraft.

Also in this issue:

• ANT Center lowers DOD dependence on GPS
• Record number of female Doctorates awarded at AFIT's Fall Commencement
• D'Azzo Research Library recognized by Library of Congress.
• Hypersonic vehicle flying qualities assessment
• Retirement of Dean Badiru

.... and more.

Accurate Covariance Estimation For Pose Data From Iterative Closest Point Algorithm, Rick H. Yuan, Clark N. Taylor, Scott L. Nykl

Faculty Publications

One of the fundamental problems of robotics and navigation is the estimation of the relative pose of an external object with respect to the observer. A common method for computing the relative pose is the iterative closest point (ICP) algorithm, where a reference point cloud of a known object is registered against a sensed point cloud to determine relative pose. To use this computed pose information in downstream processing algorithms, it is necessary to estimate the uncertainty of the ICP output, typically represented as a covariance matrix. In this paper, a novel method for estimating uncertainty from sensed data is …