Propagation error minimization method for multiple structural displacement monitoring system

In the previous study, a visually servoed paired structured light system (ViSP) which is composed of two sides facing each other, each with one or two lasers, a 2-DOF manipulator, a camera, and a screen has been proposed. The lasers project their parallel beams to the screen on the opposite side and 6-DOF relative displacement between two sides is estimated by calculating positions of the projected laser beams and rotation angles of the manipulators. To apply the system to massive civil structures such as long-span bridges or high-rise buildings, the whole area should be divided into multiple partitions and each ViSP module is placed in each partition in a cascaded manner. In other words, the movement of the entire structure can be monitored by multiplying the estimated displacements from multiple ViSP modules. In the multiplication, however, there is a major problem that the displacement estimation error is propagated throughout the multiple modules. To solve the problem, propagation error minimization method (PEMM) which uses Newton-Raphson formulation inspired by the error back-propagation algorithm is proposed. In this method, a propagation error at the last module is calculated and then the estimated displacement from ViSP at each partition is updated in reverse order by using the proposed PEMM that minimizes the propagation error. To verify the performance of the proposed method, various simulations and experimental tests have been performed. The results show that the propagation error is significantly reduced after applying PEMM.