Stereo vision based attitude measurement of aircraft model in wind tunnel

This paper investigates a stereo vision based method for model attitude measurement in wind tunnel test. A cooperative object, which can generate two bidirectional collimated laser beams, is firstly mounted on the shell of an aircraft model, and then the aircraft model is placed between two screens. The laser beams, which are projected onto the screen surfaces, generate four laser spots. Once the 3D coordinates of the laser spots are measured accurately by means of stereo vision technique, the attitude of the aircraft model can be determined by the principle of coordinate transformation. The analytical expressions for determining the attitude of an aircraft model in wind tunnel are presented in the paper. In addition, the proposed method was validated in a controlled laboratory condition. The preliminary experimental results show that the maximal error of attitude measurement is less than 0.05 on condition that the distance between two screens is about 6m.