Data Fusion with 9 Degrees of Freedom Inertial Measurement Unit To Determine Object’s Orientation

Data fusion is a technique to integrate different types of data to a single unit to provide a more reliable representation of tracking measurement. Today, data fusion can be found in many applications such as tracking and surveillance system as well as on mobile applications. In this project, 9 Degrees of Freedom (DOF) Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) composed of 3-axis Magnetometer, 3-axis Accelerometer, and 3-axis Gyroscope are processed to yield the object’s rotations in 3 dimensions. While the magnetometer (compass) is used to determine the heading angle, accelerometer is used to determine tilt axis, gyroscope can be process to calculate the angular velocity. Each sensor has its own advantages under different static or dynamic scenarios. By analyzing each sensor separately, the angle output computed from each sensor is then fused with angles from other sensors using filter algorithms. For data integration, Complimentary Filter and Extended Kalman Filter Algorithms are used in this project. To achieve a low cost solution to determine the object’s orientation, the whole experiment is conducted using an Arduino Uno board integrating with ROHM- sensor shield for Arduino (SENSORSHLD1-EVK-101) that includes 9 degrees of freedom