MEMS based Inertial Measurement Units

Inertial Measurement Units (IMU) are essentially a combination of acceleration and rotation rate sensors, generating acceleration and attitude information. For strategic applications, like outer space launchers, traditional macro-scale technologies are currently employed, owing to their very high accuracies and low drift. But they are very bulky and power consuming. Recent advancements in MEMS technology have enabled us to explore micro-electro-mechanical-systems (MEMS) based IMUs for demanding applications, which is the subject of this paper.