6-D Electromagnetic Tracking Approach Using Uniaxial Transmitting Coil and Tri-Axial Magneto-Resistive Sensor

The real-time electromagnetic tracking method has been widely applied, despite its limitations such as a high computational cost and complex hardware components. In this paper, a simple and efficient electromagnetic tracking approach, with both 3-D and 6-D pose tracking, is proposed. This approach utilizes the geomagnetic field and the magnetic field generated by the 2.5-kHz sinusoidal signal from a uniaxial transmitting coil. By extracting both the alternating current (AC) and direct current (DC) components from the outputs of a miniature tri-axial magneto-resistive sensor, the position and orientation parameters of the sensor can be computed by using the combination of the geomagnetic orientation algorithm and the magnetic dipole model-based localization algorithm. Since the implementation of the tracking algorithm is based on a sextic equation, this proposed approach is simple and fast. Experimental results show that the root-mean-square value of the position error is 2.6±0.79 mm and the orientation error is 1.4±0.61°. This tracking approach has simple structures of both software and hardware but promising performance and applicability.