Uncertainty in object pose determination with three light-stripe range measurements

A method for estimating the uncertainty in determining the pose of an object when using several light-stripe range finders is presented. Three-dimensional line segments obtained by the range finders are matched to model faces based on an interpretation tree search. The object pose is obtained by a least squares fit of the segment-face pairings. It is shown that the uncertainty in the position of the object can be estimated using the covariance matrix of the endpoint positions of the sensed line segments. Experiments with three light-stripe range finders show that this method makes it possible to estimate how accurately the pose of an object can be determined