Camera-LRF Calibration Tests
The camera-LRF calibration tests resolve the laser-range-finder beam direction the smoother’s vertical support would use (code). They feed the Corrected Ground-Truth Smoother; the derived nadir result is on Camera-LRF Extrinsic (Derived) and the range stream itself is on Laser Range Finder. Three independent constraints combine into one beam direction: an indoor flat-floor boresight fit, a transition image-space and tag-plane check, and a transition scene-range fit.
Result
The three constraints share one transition scene. Because the fiducial rig is fixed — the mocap_tag_board body agrees to 0.61 mm and 0.055 deg across the three transition runs — the scene is built once in the common tag-102 anchor frame, pooling each board’s member-tag pose candidates from all three runs into one robust SE(3) fit per board, with one support-bounded floor plane. Re-expressed in that shared scene, the maintainer per-run board poses sit up to 155 mm and 3.9 deg from the pooled poses (low-tag-count estimator scatter), while the mocap-anchored board 8 sits at 2.1 mm. Against the shared scene the indoor flat-floor beam gives 120 mm pooled supported RMSE at 79.3% support; the dominant residual is the floor plane itself (34 mm RMS, 66 mm p95) and the ~21% unsupported-hit fraction, not per-run board-pose scatter.
The result is a defended beam direction, delivered with an explicit uncertainty band rather than a false point extrinsic:
| Quantity | Value |
|---|---|
| Defended beam (nav-camera frame, z = optical axis) | [-0.042, -0.011, 0.999] |
| Off optical axis | 2.5 deg |
| Off-nadir uncertainty band | ~1.0-6.5 deg |
| Projected pixel offset from principal point | 49.6 px |
The three constraints place the off-axis magnitude at 1.0 deg (indoor flat-floor), 2.7 deg (image-space), and 6.5 deg (shared-scene), and mutually agree to within 7.4 deg. Only the off-nadir magnitude is run-repeatable: the same three constraints place the tilt at image-plane azimuths spanning roughly 161 deg, so the pointed tilt direction is not defended. The LRF lever arm is unobservable indoors and is held at zero throughout.
Promotion Deferred
This is a defended bound with explicit uncertainty, not a point extrinsic, so promotion of any camera-LRF extrinsic into the smoother is deferred until the bound tightens. The LRF enters the present transition path only as a vertical witness and diagnostic; the indoor data also support a small rigid-body-to-PX4-IMU rotation, about two degrees, from mocap angular velocity matched against the PX4 gyro.