Application and Evaluation of Lighthouse Technology for Precision Motion Capture

Abstract

Without his patience, guidance, and support this work would not have been possible. I am also grateful to FTL Labs Corp. for their assistance and sponsorship for the project. A big thanks to Damon and Jared from FTL Labs for developing a graphical user interface that aided the thesis work. To my committee members, Andrew LaPrè and Yossi Chait, I am extremely thankful for all the suggestions, critiques and feedback which have played a really important role in shaping the thesis. Last but not the least, I also wish to thank my lab-mates Ericber, Julio, Mark and Vinh who have helped me stay motivated, and whose help and suggestions have been of great assistance.

An Evaluation of Motion Trackers with Virtual Reality Sensor Technology in Comparison to a Marker-Based Motion Capture System Based on Joint Angles for Ergonomic Risk Assessment

“…They concluded that the Vive system has the potential for tracking valid and reliable kinematic data. In [ 17 ] the authors studied the performance of lighthouse technology, which is also used in the Vive system, for applications in biomechanics and robotics. They mounted a tracker on a robot end-effector and compared the poses of the motion trackers with the poses obtained by the end-effector.…”

Performance Evaluation of Optical Motion Capture Sensors for Assembly Motion Capturing

“…To this end, it is necessary to find a demonstration platform suitable to obtain the human operators' 3C product assembly motions, i.e. finding a suitable motion capture technique [8] [9]. As the 3C product assembly motions involve complicated motions of fingers and bimanual collaboration, the optical motion capture sensors, which have been included in studies of LfD for assembly applications [10]- [14], provides an effective way to record the workers' 3C product assembly motions [15].…”

A Comparative Evaluation of a Single and Stereo Lighthouse Systems for 3-D Estimation

“…Several researches that assessed 3-D pose estimation of the lighthouse localization system have been conducted [9], [13]- [25]. Niehorster et al [14] firstly conducted experiments with the lighthouse system and announced the results about its accuracy, jitter, and latency.…”

“…They reported that a sufficient care must be taken to use the system for general research purpose because the lighthouse system has a systemic error of a slanted ground problem. Sitole et al [25] solved the systemic error problem raised by Niehorster et al using an additional tracked object as a global tracking frame. Groves et al [20] conducted experiments using the second generation lighthouse system, commercial optical tracking system, and a hybrid system that combined former two systems for a medical application.…”

“…The accuracy of the camera calibration, which obtains intrinsic parameters related to camera itself and extrinsic parameters about geometric relation between two cameras is an important factor that determines the performance of the stereo vision [27]. In 3-D pose estimation with lighthouse system using SteamVR plugin or openVR software development kit (SDK) that is offered by manufacturer's side, the lighthouses are being used in a typical configuration where two base stations are being diagonally mounted above head height at maximum 5 m distance with a tilting angle of 30 to 45 degrees [14], [18], [19]- [25]. It seems that the lighthouses do not use stereo matching method for 3D estimation but use 3D-2D correspondence [15], [19] but multiple base stations were used for the expansion of detecting range.…”