The Framework of an Software-defined Gyroscope and Stochasitic Error Modeling Analysis

This paper reports an application of inertial sensors based on a brand-new concept of software-defined inertial (SDI). The idea is aiming at unfolding inertial sensors’ signal processing domain to the customers for integrating external information into the inertial sensor’s signal processing part to improve the performance of the inertial sensors and the integration system. The implementation of the software-defined gyroscope (SDG) reported in this paper is the first attempt to use the software architecture to process the signals inside the inertial device. Such a structure would bring lots of benefits, including performance improvement of inertial sensors and flexible signal processing parameter adjustment. By employing the Allan Variance method, this paper reveals the relationship between the signal processing process and the random characteristics of inertial sensors, which is critical for applications such as GPS/INS integrated systems. We show that different signal processing strategies would result in different stochastic error characteristics for the inertial sensors. Thus, we believe that the contribution of this paper can be good guidance for more advanced integrated system designs using software-defined inertial sensors.