Precision Enhancement and Performance Evaluation of a CORDIC-Based Tilting Angle Identification Algorithm for Three-Axis Accelerometers

In this paper, we analyze the precision of the tilting angles transferred from a 3-axis accelerometer with the previously proposed CORDIC-based tilting angle identification algorithm. We found out two issues of the original 2D-CORDIC operations which would increase the errors of the calculated angles. Hence, we propose the solutions to further enhance the precision of tilting angles calculated in the algorithm. We also evaluate the performance of our algorithm on 5 different platforms with different processor cores ranging from low-end micro-controllers to high-end desktop CPU. The results indicate that the algorithm is extremely suitable for implementation on low cost and low power micro-controllers to perform the real-time and in-line tilting angle computations for its low computation complexity and low memory requirements. As the results, precise tilting angles can be obtained in real-time with a low cost embedded system to be applied in various applications including medical care systems.