6DOF Electromagnetic Tracker Signal to Noise Requirements Calculation

This paper covers the electromagnetics, and includes sensitivity matrices as part of its iterative method of tracking position and orientation:

• Frederick H. Raab, Ernest B. Blood, Terry O. Steiner, Herbert R. Jones, "Magnetic Position and Orientation Tracking System", IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic systems, Vol. AES-15, No. 4, September 1979, pages 709-718.

"range" is used here as the distance between transmitter coil trio and receiver coil trio.

Raab etal use (range, alpha, beta) three-dimensional polar coordinates for position, and spherical coordinates (azimuth, elevation, roll) for orientation. This separation of range from position and orientation angles, is electromagnetically sensible:

• The dipole magnetic field is inversely proportional to the cube of range, so d_signal/signal = 3 * d_range/range.

• At a constant range, the field strength on the axis of the dipole transmitter, is twice the field strength on the equatorial plane of the dipole transmitter. This factor of two, is what permits the separation of transverse position changes (changes in position angles without change in range) from changes in orientation angles. From the sensitivity matrix R in Raab etal, we can derive that the difficulty of separating position and orientation angles leads to: d_signal/signal = 0.3 * d_angle_in_radians. See EM_Tracker_HFluxPerI_Derivation for details.

To illustrate the calculation, we consider a specific example:

• Rmax = maximum range needed = 30 centimeters = 0.3 meters

• Pnoise = 0.3 millimeters_RMS = 1.0 millimeters_95%_probability

Calculate the required signal-to-noise ratio, SNR, at maximum range Rmax:

• SNR_Rmax = d_angle_in_radians = Pnoise / Rmax = 0.001 radians = 1 milliradian

At large ranges, in the absence of magnetic-field distorters, the dominant error is due to electric-field coupling. See 6DOF_Electromagnetic_Tracker_Electric_Field.