Inertia Measurement Unit-Based Displacement Estimation via Velocity Drift Compensation Using Ordinary Least Squares Method

In this study, we propose a methodology to retrieve displacement estimates from acceleration data by employing a drift compensation algorithm. The sensing device used in this study is a micro electromechanical system type inertial measurement sensor. These type of devices are inherently noisy, and a mere numerical integration process of the acceleration data induces drifts in velocity and even larger drifts in the displacement estimation. This paper presents a offline method that determine the drift on velocity and implement a compensation for position determination. To assess the accuracy of the proposed algorithm, we compared our position estimates with the position obtained from a high accuracy motion capture system. In our experimental campaign, the sensor was moved along one axis in the forward and backward directions for different time period. In all cases, the estimated displacement closely followed the true displacement measured by the external high precision camera.