Combining multiple Large Volume Metrology systems: Competitive versus cooperative data fusion

This paper proposes a novel cooperative approach which takes account of the measurement uncertainty in distance and angular measurements of sensors of different nature. The proposed approach is compared with classical competitive approaches from the viewpoint of the metrological performance. The main advantages of the cooperative approach, with respect to the competitive one, are: (i) it is the only option when the individual LVM systems are not able to provide autonomous position measurements (e.g., laser interferometers or single cameras), (ii) it is the only option when only some of the sensors of autonomous systems work correctly (for instance, a laser tracker in which only distance - not angular - measurements are performed), (iii) when using systems with redundant sensors (i.e. photogrammetric systems with a large number of distributed cameras), point localization tends to be better than that using the competitive fusion approach.