Investigation of the effects of temperature variations on Inertial Measurement Units for UAV

The wide expansion of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is leading to an increased number of failures and accidents. Sensors and measurement platforms represent some of the most critical items from a reliability point of view because redundancy strategies to avoid failures are usually not applicable due to cost, size, and weight limitations. Furthermore, the operating conditions that the UAV could endure during a single profile mission could be highly variable and highly severe. For these reasons, it is fundamental to investigate the metrological performances and the system reliability of measurement platforms installed on UAVs taking into account the actual environmental conditions during the flight. In this work, a customized measurement setup has been developed to test the response of a set of low-cost Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) varying the operating temperature of the devices. Temperature dependencies of the IMU’s output have been investigated, taking into account a slow temperature variation within a climatic chamber up to 100 °C. The results emphasize the presence of significant drifts of the sensor’s output even within a limited temperature range, highlighting the effectiveness of a possible error compensation procedure.