Development of the wireless ultra-miniaturized inertial measurement unit WB-4: preliminary performance evaluation

Annu Int Conf IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc. 2011:2011:6927-30. doi: 10.1109/IEMBS.2011.6091751.

Abstract

This paper presents the preliminary performance evaluation of our new wireless ultra-miniaturized inertial measurement unit (IMU) WB-4 by compared with the Vicon motion capture system. The WB-4 IMU primarily contains a mother board for motion sensing, a Bluetooth module for wireless data transmission with PC, and a Li-Polymer battery for power supply. The mother board is provided with a microcontroller and 9-axis inertial sensors (miniaturized MEMS accelerometer, gyroscope and magnetometer) to measure orientation. A quaternion-based extended Kalman filter (EKF) integrated with an R-Adaptive algorithm for automatic estimation of the measurement covariance matrix is implemented for the sensor fusion to retrieve the attitude. The experimental results showed that the wireless ultra-miniaturized WB-4 IMU could provide high accuracy performance at the angles of roll and pitch. The yaw angle which has reasonable performance needs to be further evaluated.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Acceleration
  • Algorithms
  • Computers
  • Electric Power Supplies
  • Equipment Design
  • Humans
  • Lithium / chemistry
  • Micro-Electrical-Mechanical Systems
  • Microcomputers
  • Miniaturization
  • Monitoring, Physiologic / instrumentation*
  • Monitoring, Physiologic / methods*
  • Motion*
  • Polymers / chemistry
  • Reproducibility of Results
  • Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted
  • Transducers
  • Wireless Technology

Substances

  • Polymers
  • Lithium