Inertial measurement unit (IMU)
An Inertial measurement unit (IMU) is an electronic device which measures and reports body's inertia, orientation and angular speed. It accomplishes these tasks with use of several instruments such as accelerometers, gyroscopes and magnetometers all of which have capabilities of measuring data in three degrees of freedom. IMU as an instrument is essential in the engineering world since it is a crucial part of any project. Areas where IMUs are quite important are those where we have use for direct feedback on the speed, orientation and position of the body. That makes it crucial in use for design of robots, drones, satellites etc. Each sensor in the IMU supports a wide spectrum of ranges: the accelerometer’s scale can be set to ± 2, 4, 8, or 16 g, the gyroscope supports ± 245, 500, and 2000 degrees per second, and the magnetometer has full-scale ranges of ± 4, 8, 12, or 16 gauss.
Figure 4: LSM9DS1 Sparkfun IMU
IMU that group E2023 used on their bachelor thesis is LSM9DS1 Sparkfun IMU. It is a versatile, motion-sensing system in a chip. It houses a 3-axis accelerometer, 3-axis gyroscope, and 3-axis magnetometer which combines in nine degrees of freedom (9DOF). 16-bit data output is available via I2C and SPI communication protocols. Also included is the temperature sensor which is embeded in the chip.