EVALUATION OF SOLID STATE ACCELEROMETER SENSOR FOR EFFECTIVE POSITION ESTIMATION

Abstract

Inertial sensors such as Gyroscope and Accelerometer show systematic as well as random errors in the measurement. Furthermore, double integration method shows accumulation of error in position estimation due to inherent accelerometer bias drift. The primary objective of this research was to evaluate ADXL 335 acceleration sensor for better position estimation using acceleration bias drift error model. In addition, measurement data was recorded with four point rotation test for investigation of error characteristics. The fitted model was validated by using nonlinear regression analysis. The secondary objective was to examine the effect of bias drift and scale factor errors by introducing error model in Kalman Filter smoothing algorithm. The study showed that the accelerometer may be used for short distance mobile robot position estimation. This research would also help to establish a generalized test procedure for evaluation of accelerometer in terms of sensitivity, accuracy and data reliability.