Multiple Inertial Measurement Units–An Empirical Study

An inertial navigation system is commonly used in various marine platforms above and below the sea surface to calculate the position, velocity and orientation of its carrier platform. Such systems contain an inertial measurement unit (IMU) to measure the specific force and angular velocity which in turn are integrated to obtain the navigation state. Due to sensor noises and other error terms, the navigation solution drifts in time. In situations of pure inertial navigation (no external aiding), multiple IMUs (MIMU) can be used to improve the performance of a single unit. In this paper, we explore the benefits of using a MIMU system for common navigation operations. To that end, a 32 MIMU architecture (192 inertial sensors) was designed and constructed for the experimental evaluations. Utilizing this system we examined the effect of the number of sensors in the architecture versus position accuracy, stationary calibration, coarse alignment and gyro free design. We derive closed form empirical expressions enabling insight to the connection between number of IMUs to the expected performance.