Due to upcoming higher integration levels of microprocessors, the market of inertial sensors has changed in the last few years. Smart inertial sensors are becoming more and more important. This type of sensor offers the benefit of implementing sensor-processing tasks directly on the sensor hardware. The software development on such sensors is quite challenging. In this article, we propose an approach for using prerecorded sensor data during the development process to test and evaluate the functionality and timing of the sensor firmware in a repeatable and reproducible way on the actual hardware. Our proposed Sensor-in-the-Loop architecture enables the developer to inject sensor data during the debugging process directly into the sensor hardware in real time. As the timing becomes more critical in future smart sensor applications, we investigate the timing behavior of our approach with respect to timing and jitter. The implemented approach can inject data of three 3-DOF sensors at 1.6 kHz. Furthermore, the jitter shown in our proposed sampling method is at least three times lower than using real sensor data. To prove the statistical significance of our experiments, we use a Gage R&R analysis, extended by the assessment of confidence intervals of our data.
Keywords: evaluation; hardware-in-the-loop; inertial sensors; repeatability; reproducibility; smart sensor.