Applying a Real-Time Interface to an Optical Tracking System

Abstract

Computer-aided surgery is a young and exciting field of research. It is concerned with visualizing drills and other tools in relation to radiologic data allowing the surgeon to angulate these tools. Motion tracking hardware used in these applications provides high accuracy and update rates. However, current software implementations lack the important real-time constraints required for robotics or profound motion analysis. Hitherto efforts are limited to making the process fast. In this paper we present an architecture enabling applications to access common motion tracking hardware in a hard real-time environment. Our goal is to design and implement an open-source driver for motion tracking applications and to make it freely available for research and further development.