Kinematic Calibration under the Expectation Maximization Framework for Exoskeletal Inertial Motion Capture System

This study presents a kinematic calibration method for exoskeletal inertial motion capture (EI-MoCap) system with considering the random colored noise such as gyroscopic drift. In this method, the geometric parameters are calibrated by the traditional calibration method at first. Then, in order to calibrate the parameters affected by the random colored noise, the expectation maximization (EM) algorithm is introduced. Through the use of geometric parameters calibrated by the traditional calibration method, the iterations under the EM framework are decreased and the efficiency of the proposed method on embedded system is improved. The performance of the proposed kinematic calibration method is compared to the traditional calibration method. Furthermore, the feasibility of the proposed method is verified on the EI-MoCap system. The simulation and experiment demonstrate that the motion capture precision is significantly improved by 16.79% and 7.16% respectively in comparison to the traditional calibration method.