An Experimental Performance Evaluation of the Orientation Accuracy of Four Nine-Axis MEMS Motion Sensors

MEMS (Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems) inertial motion sensors have greatly improved the intelligence of wearable devices, sports fitness equipment, and consumer electronics. To avoid the disadvantages of each discrete inertial sensor, the tendency is to combine and fuse several different types of inertial motion sensors; thus, consumer-grade inertial motion sensors even have the same performance with the industrial-grade sensors. This study presents an overview of multi-axis sensor fusion algorithms and their applications. Furthermore, three typical consumer-grade AHRS (attitude and heading reference system) were verified compared with an industrial-grade sensor module (MTi-300), and three-axis orientation outputs of these sensors were compared. Static and dynamic experiment results show that MTi-300 has the best orientation accuracy (static error=0.05°, dynamic error=0.5°) compared to the other three sensor modules. Moreover, BNO055 has a better dynamic performance while compared with the other two consumer-grade motion sensors.