Development of the wireless ultra-miniaturized inertial measurement unit WB-4: Preliminary performance evaluation

This paper presents the preliminary performance evaluation of our new wireless ultra-miniaturized inertial measurement unit (IMU) WB-4 by compared with the Vicon motion capture system. The WB-4 IMU primarily contains a mother board for motion sensing, a Bluetooth module for wireless data transmission with PC, and a Li-Polymer battery for power supply. The mother board is provided with a microcontroller and 9-axis inertial sensors (miniaturized MEMS accelerometer, gyroscope and magnetometer) to measure orientation. A quaternion-based extended Kalman filter (EKF) integrated with an R-Adaptive algorithm for automatic estimation of the measurement covariance matrix is implemented for the sensor fusion to retrieve the attitude. The experimental results showed that the wireless ultra-miniaturized WB-4 IMU could provide high accuracy performance at the angles of roll and pitch. The yaw angle which has reasonable performance needs to be further evaluated.