Random Errors in Determining the Range of Time-of-Flight Cameras and Their Effect on the Accuracy of Measurements

Three-dimensional time-of-flight cameras find increasingly broad application in robotics for the information support of motion guidance tasks and are considered promising to solve the problems of docking with non-cooperative spacecrafts. In this case, the magnitudes of relative coordinate measurement errors provided by a time-of-flight camera are very important. Random (noise) errors are analyzed to reveal a strong correlation between the random errors in measuring the range of time-of-flight cameras for neighboring pixels. For a particular example, an analytical solution is constructed to demonstrate an essential decrease in the precision of range measurements in the presence of this correlation.