Based on a small, lightweight, low-cost high performance inertial Measurement Units(IMU), an effective calibration method is implemented to evaluate the performance of Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems(MEMS) sensors suffering from various errors to get acceptable navigation results. A prototype development board based on FPGA, dual core processor’s configuration for INS/GPS integrated navigation...

Pose estimation purely based on 3D point-cloud could suffer from degradation, e.g. scan blocks or scans in repetitive environments. To deal with this problem, we propose an approach for fusing 3D spinning LiDAR and IMU to estimate the ego-motion of the sensor body. The main idea of our work is to optimize the poses and states of two kinds of sensors with non-linear optimization methods. On the ...

Visual-Inertial Odometry (VIO) utilizes an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) to overcome the limitations of Visual Odometry (VO). However, the VIO for vehicles in large-scale outdoor environments still has some difficulties in estimating forward motion with distant features. To solve these difficulties, we propose a robust VIO method based on the analysis of feature confidence in forward motion e...

This research aims at enhancing the accuracy of navigation systems by integrating GPS and Micro-ElectroMechanical-System (MEMS) based inertial measurement units (IMU). Because of the conditions required by the large number of restrictions on empirical data, a conventional Extended Kalman Filtering (EKF) is limited to apply in navigation systems by integrating MEMS-IMU/GPS. In response to non-li...

Low-cost MEMS-based IMUs, video cameras and portable GNSS devices are commercially available for automotive applications and some manufacturers have already integrated such facilities into their vehicle systems. GNSS provides positioning, navigation and timing solutions to users worldwide. However, signal attenuation, reflections or blockages may give rise to positioning difficulties. As oppose...

OBJECTIVE To correctly measure the knee joint angle, this study utilized a Qualisys motion capture system and also used it as the reference to assess the validity of the study's Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) system that consisted of four IMU sensors and the Knee Angle Recorder software. The validity was evaluated by the root mean square (RMS) of different angles and the intraclass correlation...

Small satellite missions are characterized by tight constraints on cost, mass, power, and volume that generally make them unable to fly inertial measurement units (IMUs) required for orbital missions demanding precise orientation and positioning. Instead, small satellite missions typically fly low-cost micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS) IMUs. The performance characteristics of MEMS IMUs mak...

We present the design of an all-accelerometer inertial measurement unit (IMU). The IMU forms part of an intelligent hand-held microsurgical instrument that senses its own motion, distinguishes between hand tremor and intended motion, and compensates in real-time the erroneous motion. The new IMU design consists of three miniature dual-axis accelerometers, two of which are housed in a sensor sui...

Robot calibration is a useful diagnostic method for improving the positioning accuracy in robot production and maintenance. An online robot self-calibration method based on inertial measurement unit (IMU) is presented in this paper. The method requires that the IMU is rigidly attached to the robot manipulator, which makes it possible to obtain the orientation of the manipulator with the orienta...

The localization of persons in indoor environments is nowadays an open problem. There are partial solutions based on the deployment of a network of sensors (Local Positioning Systems or LPS). Other solutions only require the installation of an inertial sensor on the person's body (Pedestrian Dead-Reckoning or PDR). PDR solutions integrate the signals coming from an Inertial Measurement Unit (IM...