Accurate Determination of Object Position from Imprecise Data

The problem of accurate determination of object position from imprecise and excess measurement data arises in kinematics, biomechanics, robotics, CAD/CAM and flight/vehicle simulator design. Several methods described in the literature are reviewed. Two new methods which take advantage of the modern matrix oriented software (e.g., MATLAB, IMSL, EISPACK) are presented and compared with a “basic” method. It is found that both of the proposed decomposition methods (I: SVD/QR and II: SVD/QS) give better absolute results than a “basic” method available from the text books. On a relative basis, the second method (SVD/QS Decomposition) gives slightly better results than the first method (SVD/QR Decomposition). Examples are presented for the cases when the points chosen are nearly dependent and when the independent points have small random errors in their coordinates.