Power management for electromagnetic position tracking systems

A position tracking system comprising:

• an electromagnetic (EM) receiver configured to generate a relative pose between an EM transmitter and the EM receiver;
• and,
• one or more processors configured to:
• identify a first metric that is correlated to jitter in the relative pose;
• and
• set a power mode of at least one of the EM transmitter and the EM receiver based on the first metric, wherein in response to setting the power mode based on the first metric, one or more samples are discarded that are generated from received EM data.

A position tracking system, comprising:

• an electromagnetic (EM) receiver configured to generate a relative pose between an EM transmitter and the EM receiver;
• and,
• one or more processors configured to:
• in response to detecting a sleep condition, placing the EM transmitter in a sleep mode by lowering a transmission power level of the EM transmitter, wherein in response to placing the EM transmitter in the sleep mode, discarding one or more samples of data from the EM transmitter.