Robust methods for estimating the orientation and position of IMU and MARG sensors

Abstract The inertial measurement unit (IMU) and magnetic, angular rate, and gravity (MARG) sensor orientation and position are widely used in the medical, robotics, and other fields. In general, the orientations can be defined by the integration of angular velocity data, and the positions are also computed from the double integration of acceleration data. However, the acceleration and angular velocity data are often inaccurate due to measurement errors which arise when the sensor moves quickly. Therefore, the orientations and positions significantly differ from the actual values. To address these issues, several techniques are proposed for the accurate measurement of IMU and MARG sensor orientations and positions. The proposed optimization method is applied to raw sensor data to compute faithful orientations by stabilizing and accelerating the convergence of the optimization process. Furthermore, a deep neural network based on 1D convolutional neural network (CNN) layers is proposed to predict the desired velocity from raw acceleration data. The method is validated qualitatively and quantitatively with an optical motion capture (mocap) system. The experimental results show that the proposed method significantly improves orientation and position estimations compared to those of other approaches.