Smart Prism with Tilt Compensation for CAN bus on Mobile Machinery Using Robotic Total Stations

TL;DR

This paper introduces a Smart Prism with tilt compensation using an IMU to improve the accuracy of reference points on off-road vehicles, facilitating validation of autonomous systems in real-world conditions.

Contribution

It presents a novel Smart Prism prototype integrating an IMU and adaptive filtering for real-time tilt compensation in robotic total station measurements.

Findings

Achieved 2.9mm to 23.6mm RMS errors in dynamic tests.

Demonstrated suitability for validating centimeter-level navigation.

Enabled virtual point of interest transmission over CAN bus.

Abstract

Accurate reference trajectories are required to validate autonomous agricultural robots and highly automated off-road vehicles under real-world field conditions. In practice, robotic total stations provide millimeter-level prism center coordinates, but the point of interest on the vehicle is typically displaced by a lever arm, ranging from decimeters to multiple meters. Roll and pitch motions, as typically observed in off-road machinery, therefore introduce horizontal point of interest errors far exceeding the measurement accuracy of robotic total stations observations. This paper presents the design, implementation, and validation of a Smart Prism prototype that augments a robotic total station prism with an inertial measurement unit to enable real-time tilt compensation. The prototype integrates an STM32H7 microcontroller and a Murata SCH16T-series IMU and estimates roll and pitch angles using an adaptive complementary filter. The tilt-compensated point of interest coordinates are obtained by transforming a calibrated lever arm from the body frame into the navigation frame and combining it with robotic total station prism positions. To support vehicle-side integration, the system can transmit prism and tilt-compensated point of interest coordinates on the Controller Area Network bus, allowing the point of interest to be treated as a virtual position sensor (e.g., co-located with a rear-axle reference point). Experiments with a fixed ground reference point, using a prism to point of interest lever arm of approximately 1.07m and manual roll/pitch excursions of up to 60 deg, yield three-dimensional root-mean-square errors between 2.9mm and 23.6mm across five test series. The results demonstrate that IMU-based tilt compensation enables reference measurements suitable for validating centimeter-level navigation systems under dynamic field conditions.