Inertial Sensors

Post date: Jun 10, 2012 12:15:21 PM

I plan to develop hardware to measure angular position. First, I will attempt to work with one axis and later extend to three full axes. After exploration, I found the current state-of-art is to use an accelerometer, gyroscope and magnetic sensor. Since these sensors have different advantages, by combining their signals appropriately can result in a better accuracy than using just one sensor alone.

• • 1-DOF Tilt Sensor: The information from a gyroscope and a 2-axis accelerometer is combined using Kalman filter to obtain the best approximation of the tilt angle.

  • 3-DOF Tilt Sensor: A 3-axis magnetic sensor and a 3-axis accelerometer is used to determine the absolute tilt position in 3 degrees of freedom. However, this will only suitable for quasi-static application.

Some reading about inertial sensors

• • Inertial Measurement Unit From Wikipedia

  • Inertial Guidance System From Wikipedia