[OSM-talk] Motion sensors for navigation

[Liz]

On Tue, 23 Mar 2010, Emilie Laffray wrote:
> They might when they have some working prototypes :) I can't imagine the
> calculation problem that they would be getting using 6 motions sensors (3
> accelerometers, and 3 gyroscopes).
> 
My son can answer with great accuracy the accuracy question of an inertial 
navigation system 
and I quote from his honours paper

 
8     INS Results
8.1 Accuracy
The accuracy from the INS was very low. In the green trail, the simplest of 
all the trails and the
only one reduced from the INS data because of the difficulty in performing the 
reduction, there was
a 65km error. The distance between the start and end of the trail is only 
270m. This makes an error
of approximately 240 times the distance traveled.
    This error did behave in the way expected from the INS. It was mostly in 
the distance covered,
with the shape of the trail and the corners represented in the trail  The 
error also
increased exponentially with time, leading to much greater errors at the end 
of the trail then at the
beginning. This also makes reduction of the data much more difficult as a 
linear fit of the data to the
GPS data will not remove the errors, but will simply rearrange them.