Development of a highly accurate and low cost measurement device for Field Operational Tests

Field Operational Tests are conducted in the automotive industry to obtain data in large-scale testing programs under real operating conditions. In this paper we present a novel measuring device, which has many advantages compared to common instrument devices employed for Field Operational Tests. It consists of a Micro-Electro-Mechanical System inertial sensor and a GPS module coupled with a Raspberry Pi as data logger. In order to evaluate and to validate the accuracy we compare our developed measuring device with a dedicated Inertial Measurement Unit. For this purpose, we perform specific maneuvers with both systems and compare and analyze the signals. The calculated statistical key figures to compare the signals demonstrate that our device is highly accurate and works robust. The coefficient of determination for lateral and longitudinal accelerations and for yaw rate exceeds 0.99. The error for the vertical acceleration is 4.10 percent for the unfiltered and 2.52 percent for the filtered signal on average.