Development of a High-Efficiency Pitch/Roll Inertial Measurement Unit Based on a Low-Cost Accelerometer and Gyroscope Sensors

Abstract

This paper describes an original pitch/roll IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit) for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) and general robotics applications. The development process is reported and the obtained results of experiments are discussed. The IMU has two key advantages: a) high quality output data is produced at high frequency (1 kHz), b) low cost accelerometer and gyroscope sensors are used. A dedicated 3-axis gimbal has been built to calibrate and test the sensors and later to tune the parameters of the Kalman Filter.