Vision Guidance System for Autocollimator with Single Camera

Cubic prisms are commonly used to present pose and position of instruments in aerospace fields. Theodolites are used to get horizontal and vertical angles of cubic prisms by collimating. To improve the efficiency of collimating, an automatic collimation method for autocollimator was proposed based on a vision guidance system. A camera was used to get pose parameters of the aimed cubic prism according to the autocollimator. Pose and position estimation algorithm was presented using 2D-3D correspondences of the cubic prism. Simulation results on a planar platform showed that the vision guidance system was effective and the automatic collimation method was feasible.