Electronic – How to determine position from gyroscope and accelerometer input

accelerometergyroimumathsensor

I have a 3-axis accelerometer and a 2-axis gyroscope. I intend to measure something that only moves in the X and Z axis. I've heard of using Kalman filters to smooth out the acceleration vectors, but I can't find a good tutorial for a complete beginner to the topic. Also, I know I can double integrate acceleration to get position, but how do I do this with a finite number of sampled acceleration vectors? I would appreciate links to good tutorials for beginners on both these topics.

Best Answer

Here's a tutorial on implementing a direction cosine matrix for an IMU: http://gentlenav.googlecode.com/files/DCMDraft2.pdf

Take a look at the ArduIMU pages: http://code.google.com/p/ardu-imu/wiki/Theory

Here are a couple of open source projects which do this. Reading the code should give some clues:

http://code.google.com/p/gluonpilot/source/browse/trunk/Firmware/#Firmware/rtos_pilot%3Fstate%3Dclosed

http://code.google.com/p/sf9domahrs/