PROCEEDINGS ARTICLE | November 14, 2002
Proc. SPIE. 4935, Smart Structures, Devices, and Systems
KEYWORDS: Microelectromechanical systems, Sensors, Calibration, Error analysis, Kinematics, Data acquisition, Quantization, Electronic filtering, Filtering (signal processing), Global Positioning System
Measurement characterisation of error has been performed from synthetic acceleration data. A variety of kinematics computation techniques were investigated and then applied. Data acquisition specifications, including analogue to digital conversion (ADC) resolution (6, 8, 10, 12 and 14 bit) and sampling rate (100, 150, 200, 250, 300, 375, 500 and 600 Hz), have been varied to investigate the effect on the accuracy of kinematics data with respect to short (20m) displacements. The magnitude of the errors in acceleration, velocity and position are reported for the simulated data. Also, error reduction techniques, including over-sampling and oversampling/multiple point averaging/reduced data transmission, were implemented to examine their effectiveness. The results of this investigation show that MEMS accelerometers are subjected to significant amount of errors, and require accurate calibration and characterisation of errors. Error reduction techniques are also necessary to ensure accurate computation of kinematics information.
