Data processing of inertial sensors in strong-vibration environment

Data processing of low-cost inertial sensors has been and still is a big issue for many engineers in commercial companies, laboratories, and academia. Inertial sensors compose a measurement unit used as the basis of navigation systems. These systems can be found almost everywhere; it does not matter if it is in pharmaceutics, robotics, automotive industry, aerospace etc. However, there is always a need to specify under which conditions the systems are supposed to operate. This paper deals with the processing of inertial sensor data measured in an environment with strong vibrations on the ultra-light aircraft ATEC 321. It was a great challenge to process the data in such a way as to ensure the acceptable behavior of the artificial horizon system. Because the system should rely only on acceleration and angular rate sensing, the correctness and efficiency of data filtering as well as consecutive data processing play a key role. Results regarding data analyses and comparisons of different approaches are presented.