Estimating the Linear and Angular Velocities of a Free-Flying Object

In this paper, we investigate the problem of estimating the instantaneous position, orientation, velocity, and angular velocity of a rigid body during its free flight. Precisely speaking, the flight is under the influences of gravity, air drag, and the Magnus force only. Two cameras are synchronized to take images of the flying object. Feature points are extracted from each frame as observables from a governing system which integrates quaternion-based dynamics with a camera model that deals with radial distortion. An extended Kalman filter (EKF) is employed to carry out the online estimation. Experimental results have demonstrated a close match between the two image sequences cast by the object’s real motion and the estimated one.