Semester

Fall

Date of Graduation

2020

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Type

MS

College

Statler College of Engineering and Mineral Resources

Department

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

Committee Chair

Patrick Browning

Committee Member

Wade Huebsch

Committee Member

Christopher Griffin

Abstract

Low-cost sensors for state space determination can be used successfully for ground vehicles, robots, unmanned aerial vehicles, and Internet-of-Things applications. When a high fidelity Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) cannot be obtained for state space determination, low-cost sensors can be used to satisfactory standards, despite their limitations in capabilities, by using various implementation techniques. The research group was experimentally investigating state space information of an unstable flying vehicle for motion simulation validation. The high fidelity motion capture system would intermittently lose track of the flight vehicle which lost critical flight data.

The goal was to determine the potential of low-cost off-the-shelf sensors to provide a lower fidelity backup source of data. There were periods during the flight test where the flying vehicle was known to experience rotation rates higher than the saturation limit of the low-cost sensors. The purpose of the experiment was to analyze the ability of a skewed-redundant IMU (SRIMU) configuration to extend the dynamic range of the MEMS gyroscope and to reconstruct body axis rotation rates that would have otherwise been saturated.

The experiment was able to determine the potential of low-cost off the shelf IMU sensors in a skewed redundant IMU configuration to reconstruct saturated values. There was success in extending the dynamic range of the sensors in cases where a rotation matrix could be utilized to transform data between reference frames. However there were instances where the dynamic range could not be extended due to relative differences in time between sensors which incurred over the duration of the flight tests.

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