Inertia-Link orientation sensor holds promise for a wide variety of applications and eliminates the need for host systems to perform time integrations.Inertia-Link wireless inertial sensors can enable machines to sense their own angular position and to estimate their linear movement. The developers, MicroStrain Inc., Williston, Vt., project a wide variety of applications: unmanned vehicle navigation, platform stabilization, biomechanisms, borehole surveying, and smart athletic equipment.
The sensor package includes three orthogonal rate gyroscopes, three orthogonal accelerometers, a microprocessor, data logger, and RF transceiver. Inertia-Link provides user-adjustable sampling rates and digital data output rates. It supports a variety of communications options, including: wireless IEEE802.15.4, USB, RS-232/485, and CANbus.
Inertia-Link packs advanced sensing capabilities into a small envelope (44 58 21mm) that weighs 45 g without a battery and low power consumption — 500mW. It comes with full sensor calibration and is fully temperature compensated for temperatures from 20° to 60° C. The Sensor module also has the ability to measure high-speed, complex motions without having to resort to high computation rates.
Inertia-Link's sensor-processor can be used by itself in OEM applications. A variety of output data quantities are available, including delta angle and delta velocity. These parmeters are similar to acceleration and angular rate vectors, except they are time integrated over one system clock cycle (for example, over one 10 msec period). This eliminates the need for the host system to perform time integration.
For more information contact MicroStrain Inc. at (802) 862-6629 or visit www.microstrain.com
