Computation of Rigid-Body Angular Acceleration From Point-Acceleration Measurements

Abstract

The computation of the angular acceleration of a rigid body from measurements of accelerations of three noncollinear points of the body is presented in this paper. This is based on algorithms presented previously for the computation of the orientation and the angular velocity of a rigid body from measurements of position and velocity of three noncollinear points of the body. Moreover, compatibility conditions that the said point measurements should verify are introduced. These are necessary to verify the rigidity assumption on the one hand; on the other hand, they are introduced as a means of filtering roundoff and/or measurement errors, which is particularly useful if redundant measurements are taken, i.e., on more than three points. The procedure is illustrated with a fully solved example.