ABSTRACT
The accurate estimation of the orientation of a rigid body, relative to an inertial frame, is required for a wide range of applications. The recent development of low-cost and light-weight micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) allowed the design of small and cheap inertial measurement units (IMUs). They have had a successful impact both in several research areas and in consumer electronics. Widespread daily-life applications are mainly human-machine interfaces in smartphones and game consoles. Typical applications where inertial sensors are exploited in the professional service are real-time motion capture systems to track the location and the body posture of people [1,2], gait analysis for rehabilitation purposes, and biomedical applications as well as for performance assessment of the aging population [3,4]. The use of inertial sensor-based systems is growing even in advanced robotic applications, for example, localization and wheel slip estimation of a skid steered mobile robot [5], position and attitude determination for micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) [6], unmanned airborne vehicles (UAVs) [7,8], and unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) [9].
