New platform spurs innovation by simplifying evaluation and the development of sensor fusion algorithms.
Qualtré, Inc, a leader in the development and commercialization of Bulk Acoustic Wave MEMS inertial sensors, has debuted a MEMS sensor evaluation platform with 11 degrees of freedom (DOF). This evaluation platform combines three axes of gyroscopic data, three axes of accelerometer data, three axes of magnetic data, as well as barometric pressure/altitude and temperature. The company’s sensor fusion application software library leverages the Atmel | SMART SAM4E Cortex-M4 MCU.
“With an integrated sensor fusion framework, designers can focus on their unique motion based application,” explains Dr. Sreeni Rao, Qualtré’s VP of Vertical Markets. “It’s all about bringing the relevant data together from multiple sensors to provide a more comprehensive and accurate picture of what’s going on in a system. The Qualtré 11-DOF evaluation platform makes it easy to interface multiple sensors and get started immediately writing, compiling and running sensor based applications which can easily be ported to the end-user platform.”
The current version of the sensor fusion platform provides software support for a number of functions, including Wi-Fi-based 11-DOF real-time telemetry, sensor fusion quaternion outputs, corrected heading direction and second order temperature compensation.
Typically speaking, a key challenge in sensor fusion is effectively separating signal, motion and noise. Fortunately, Qualtré’s algorithms aim to take data from different sensors that observe the same event to distinguish between noise and signals, then compute more accurate information. Sensor fusion encompasses a variety of techniques which leverage the environmental monitoring of the individual sensors and combine them intelligently to achieve broader and more precise results.
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