Temperature stress tests on low-cost IMU systems: Analysis and first proposal for enhancing performance

Nowadays, low-cost Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) can be easily found in several applications belonging to different fields such as automotive, healthcare, robotics, autonomous driving, and many others. In most cases, such devices are MEMS-based IMUs and can be requested to operate in a harsh environment characterized by vibration and wide temperature changes. However, most of the time, low-cost devices are not provided by a rigorous characterization, as an example, a mathematical relationship regarding their dependency on the temperature is generally not given. For this reason, the paper has investigated the design of a temperature stress test in order to verify the reliability of a commonly adopted low-cost IMU and its dependency on temperature changes. More in detail, three identical IMUs have been considered, analyzing both the repeatability of the IMU's behavior providing several test repetitions and the influence of the particular IMU orientation on the sensors'output during the stress test. Thanks to the results obtained, a first calibration guideline for the temperature compensation has been proposed and applied to the IMUs under test.