Design and implementation of dynamic simulators for the testing of inertial sensors

Many dynamic simulators have been developed in the last thirty years for different types of vehicles. Flight simulators and drive simulators are very well known examples. This paper describes the design and implementation of a dynamic simulator for the testing of inertial sensors devoted to vehicle navigation through a Hardware-In-The-Loop test rig composed of an industrial robot and a commercially available Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU). The authors are developing an innovative localization algorithm for railway vehicles which integrates inertial sensors with tachometers. The opportunity to set up a testing simulator capable of replicating in a realistic fashion the dynamic effects of the vehicle motion on inertial sensors allows to avoid expensive on board acquisitions and to speed up algorithm tuning. The real-time control architecture featured by the available industrial robot allows to precisely specify and execute motion trajectories with tight path and time law constraints required by the application at hand.