Method for measuring the center of mass and moment of inertia of a model using 3D point clouds

Abstract

We propose a method for measuring the center of mass and moment of inertia of a model using 3D point clouds. First, we use point cloud registration and segmentation to obtain point clouds of model parts with different material densities. Then, we correct the point cloud coordinates by principal component analysis, and we perform 2.5D volume calculations in three directions. Finally, we input the material density for each model part, perform point cloud reconstruction, and calculate the center of mass and moment of inertia. In experiments, we measured the center of mass and moment of inertia simultaneously by using multiple time-of-flight cameras. The results demonstrated that the proposed method accurately measured the center of mass and moment of inertia with errors of < 1 m m and < 3 % , respectively. This is a promising approach for automatically measuring models of aircraft, cars, etc.