Geometrical configuration comparison of redundant inertial measurement units

Abstract

Inertial measurement units (IMUs) are used in a wide range of applications to estimate position, velocity, and attitude of vehicles. The high cost of tactical grade IMUs makes the low-cost microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) based IMUs appealing. These types of IMUs are less accurate, so to counteract this effect, multiple and different configurations should be used. The work presented here provides efficient and low cost solutions using different configurations of redundant (multiple) MEMS-IMU swarms, which increase the level of accuracy to potentially the order of that of a tactical IMU. Several configurations are presented and compared through different methods.