Identification of the ten inertia parameters of a rigid body

Standard experiments for identifying inertia parameters of a rigid body only provide a subset of the inertia parameters of the body [1-10]. In addition, they do not use in the estimation process the complete information included in the equations of motion of the rigid test body. The objective of the work described in this paper is the simultaneous, automatic experimental identification of the ten inertia parameters of a rigid body using the complete information hidden in the nonlinear model equations of the test body. This task has been solved in several steps: - mathematical modelling of the special motions of a rigid body in space. These model equations have been mapped into a form suitable for identification purposes (identification hypothesis), - design of a special measurement robot for performing the identification experiments, - laboratory experiments providing test data used for the identification experiments, - identification of the inertia parameters and accuracy tests, The accuracy of the identified parameters is satisfactory.