Working with Inertial Measurement Unit

An Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) is an electronic device that measures velocity, orientation, and gravitational forces using a combination of accelerometers, gyroscopes, and magnetometers. An IMU has a lot of applications in robotics; some of the applications are in balancing of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and robot navigation.

In this section, we discuss the role of IMU in mobile robot navigation and some of the latest IMUs on the market and its interfacing with Launchpad.

Inertial Navigation

An IMU provides acceleration and orientation relative to inertial space, if you know the initial position, velocity, and orientation, you can calculate the velocity by integrating the sensed acceleration and the second integration gives the position. To get the correct direction of the robot, the orientation of the robot is required; this can be obtained by integrating sensed angular velocity from gyroscope.

The following figure illustrates an inertial navigation...