On the Construction of Kinematic Confidence Ellipsoids for Uncertain Spatial Displacements

Abstract

This paper deals with the problem of estimating confidence regions of a set of uncertain spatial displacements for a given level of confidence or probabilities. While a direct application of the commonly used statistic methods to the coordinates of the moving frame is straight-forward, it is also the least effective in that it grossly overestimate the confidence region. Based on the dual-quaternion representation, this paper introduces the notion of the kinematic confidence ellipsoids as an alternative to the existing method called rotation and translation confidence limit (RTCL). An example is provided to demonstrate how the kinematic confidence ellipsoids can be computed.