THEORETICAL ASSESSMENT OF INERTIA TENSOR MEASUREMENT ACCURACY. PART 2: GENERAL CASE

The measurement of the full inertia tensor of a rigid body usually involves the measurement of different moments of inertia around different rotation axes. Then the reconstruction of the inertia tensor from these measurements can be performed. The analysis on how locating at best such rotation axes is presented in the companion paper of this one. In this paper the whole sources of uncertainty are considered. In particular, the effect of the location of the centre of gravity on the measurement accuracy of the inertia tensor has been studied. This effect can be neglected if the rotation axes pass through or near the estimated location of the centre of gravity. Otherwise, the measurement uncertainty grows almost linearly with this distance and can be quite large.