Parallel Pointing Systems Suitable for Robotic Total Stations: Selection, Dimensional Synthesis, and Accuracy Analysis

Robotic Total Stations (RTS) are fully automated theodolites with electronic distance measurement (EDM) that include a number of additional tools (e.g., camera, laser rangefinder, onboard computer, and tracking software, etc.) enabling them to work autonomously. The added tools make RTSs able to track mobile targets on civil structures thus opening to the use of RTSs in structural monitoring. Unfortunately, the available RTSs are able to track a target up to a motion rate of 3 Hz. Reducing mobile masses is a viable design strategy for extending this frequency border. Such a strategy is pursued in this study by proposing the use of parallel pointing systems (PPS) as basic mechanical architectures for RTSs. The literature on PPSs is reviewed and the applicable PPS architectures are selected. Successively, the selected architectures are sized according to RTSs’ functional requirements, and the positioning precision of the sized mechanisms is evaluated. The result of this study is that there are three PPS architectures suitable for RTSs, whose detailed comparison is also presented.