Implementation and Characterization of Commercial Off-The-Shelf Inertial Measurement Units for the Attitude Determination System of the MOVE-III CubeSat

This paper determines a suitable Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) for the Attitude Determination and Control System (ADCS) of the third satellite generation of the Munich Orbital Verification Experiment (MOVE). The ADCS is required to provide an attitude determination with an accuracy of \u3c 1°, which has to be achieved with both IMUs and sun sensors, at a low price, due to a low financial budget. In the context of this work, the three IMUs the BNO055, ICM20948 and LSM9DS1 are selected and analyzed. Additionally, the LIS3MDL magnetometer and the BMI088 gyroscope are used for further analysis and comparison. The error coefficients of each sensor measurement are initially calculated through the Allan variance, and these are then verified through Welch’s power spectral density estimate, simulations, and additional sensor measurements. Further temperature experiments are performed to characterize the behaviour of the sensor under changing temperatures. Evaluating the most accurate error coefficients found the BNO055 gyroscope to be the least affected by the white noise compared to the remaining gyroscopes. The LSM9DS1 appears to be the sensor least influenced by the random walk and white noise term among the magnetometers. The BNO055 magnetometer is the comparatively least affected by temperature changes, while the BMI088 appears the most stable amongst the gyroscopes. Finally, the BNO055 IMU is recommended to the ADCS of the MOVE-III CubeSat. It appeared to be the least influenced by different error sources and the ambient temperature