A wireless micro inertial measurement unit (IMU)

Abstract

In this paper, we present a wireless micro inertial measurement unit (IMU) with the smallest volume and weight requirements available at the moment. With a size of 18mm × 16mm × 4 mm, this IMU provides full control over the data of a three-axis accelerometer, a three-axis gyroscope, and a three-axis magnetometer. It meets the design prerequisites of a space-saving design and eliminates the need of a hard-wired data communication while still being comparable to state of the art commercially available MEMS IMUs. A CC430 microcontroller sends the collected raw data to a base station wirelessly with a maximum sensor sample rate of 640 samples per second. Thereby, the IMU performance is optimized by moving data post processing to the base station. This development offers important features in embedded microsystem applications with their significant size and weight requirements.