Kalman Filter for Estimation of Sensor Acceleration Using Six - axis Inertial Sensor

Although an accelerometer is a sensor that measures acceleration, it cannot be used by itself to measure the acceleration when the orientation of the sensor changes. This paper introduces a Kalman filter for the estimation of a sensor acceleration based on a six-axis inertial sensor (i.e., a three-axis accelerometer and three-axis gyroscope). The novelty of the proposed Kalman filter lies in the fact that its state vector includes not only the tilt angle variable but also the sensor acceleration. Thus, the filter can explicitly estimate the latter with a high accuracy. The accuracy of acceleration estimates were validated experimentally under three different dynamic conditions, using an optical motion capture system. It could be concluded that the performance of the proposed Kalman filter was comparable to that of the state-of-the-art estimation algorithm employed by the Xsens MTw. The proposed algorithm may be more suitable than inertial/magnetic sensor-based algorithms for various applications adopting six-axis inertial sensors