scholarly journals A New Optimization Approach for a Solar Tracker Based on an Inertial Measurement Unit

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (5) ◽  
pp. 7542-7550
Author(s):  
M. R. Rezoug ◽  
M. Benaouadj ◽  
D. Taibi ◽  
R. Chenni

Improvements and applications of Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) sensors have increased in several areas. They are generally used in equipment that measures orientation, gravitational force, and speed. Therefore, in this paper, we worked on improving the performance of IMU in an application on solar trackers of the Kalman filter. This work illustrates the design of an autonomous device with astronomical control of a photovoltaic (PV) panel, allowing the optimization of the orientation/energy gain ratio. The device is based on two concepts at the same time, the modeling of the solar trajectory adopted by an algorithm which calculates continuously the solar angles (elevation and azimuth) and the approval of these by the IMU in order to sweep away any climatic fluctuations and thus allow an almost perfect adjustment relative to the perpendicular axis of the rays. The tracking system is based on two joints controlled by an Arduino control board. Experiments have shown a better performance of the two-axis device: the net energy gains can be around 34% with an additional 1.1% when the Kalman filter is applied.

2014 ◽  
Vol 602-605 ◽  
pp. 2958-2961
Author(s):  
Tao Lai ◽  
Guang Long Wang ◽  
Wen Jie Zhu ◽  
Feng Qi Gao

Micro inertial measurement unit integration storage test system is a typical multi-sensor information fusion system consists of microsensors. The Federated Kalman filter is applied to micro inertial measurement unit integration storage test system. The general structure and characteristics of Federated Kalman filter is expounded. The four-order Runge-Kutta method based on quaternion differential equation was used to dispose the output angular rate data from gyroscope, and the recurrence expressions was established too. The control system based ARM Cortex-M4 master-slave structure is adopted in this paper. The result shown that the dimensionality reduced algorithm significantly reduces implementation complexity of the method and the amount computation. The filtering effect and real-time performance have much increased than traditionally method.


Sensors ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (10) ◽  
pp. 3435 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xin Li ◽  
Yan Wang ◽  
Kourosh Khoshelham

Ultra wideband (UWB) has been a popular technology for indoor positioning due to its high accuracy. However, in many indoor application scenarios UWB measurements are influenced by outliers under non-line of sight (NLOS) conditions. To detect and eliminate outlying UWB observations, we propose a UWB/Inertial Measurement Unit (UWB/IMU) fusion filter based on a Complementary Kalman Filter to track the errors of position, velocity and direction. By using the least squares method, the positioning residual of the UWB observation is calculated, the robustness factor of the observation is determined, and an observation weight is dynamically set. When the robustness factor does not exceed a pre-defined threshold, the observed value is considered trusted, and adaptive filtering is used to track the system state, while the abnormity of system state, which might be caused by IMU data exceptions or unreasonable noise settings, is detected by using Mahalanobis distance from the observation to the prior distribution. When the robustness factor exceeds the threshold, the observed value is considered abnormal, and robust filtering is used, whereby the impact of UWB data exceptions on the positioning results is reduced by exploiting Mahalanobis distance. Experimental results show that the observation error can be effectively estimated, and the proposed algorithm can achieve an improved positioning accuracy when affected by outlying system states of different quantity as well as outlying observations of different proportion.


Author(s):  
Qizhi He ◽  
Weiguo Zhang ◽  
Degang Huang ◽  
Huakun Chen ◽  
Jinglong Liu

Optimal two stage Kalman filter (OTSKF) is able to obtain optimal estimation of system states and bias for linear system which contains random bias. Unscented Kalman filter (UKF) is a conventional nonlinear filtering method which utilizes Sigmas point sampling and unscented transformation technology realizes propagation of state means and covariances through nonlinear system. Aircraft is a typical complicate nonlinear system, this paper treats the faults of Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) as random bias, established a filtering model which contains faults of IMU. Hybird the two stage filtering technique and UKF, this paper proposed an optimal two stage unscented Kalman filter (OTSUKF) algorithm which is suitable for fault diagnosis of IMU, realized optimal estimation of system states and faults identification of IMU via proposed innovative designing method of filtering model and the algorithm was validated that it is robust to wind disterbance via real flight data and it is also validated that proposed OTSUKF is optimal in the existance of wind disturbance via comparing with the existance iterated optimal two stage extended kalman filter (IOTSEKF) method.


Author(s):  
Qizhi He ◽  
Weiguo Zhang ◽  
Xiaoxiong Liu ◽  
Weinan Li

In the case of nonlinear systems with random bias, the Optimal Two-Stage Unscented Kalman Filter (OTSUKF) can obtain the optimal estimation of system state and bias. But it requires random bias to be accurately modeled, while it is always very difficult in actual situation because the aircraft is a typical nonlinear system. In this paper, the faults of the Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) are treated as a random bias, and the random walk model is used to describe the fault. The accuracy of the random walk model depends on the degree of matching between the covariance of the random walk model and the actual situation. For the IMU fault diagnosis method based on OTSUKF, the covariance of the random walk model is assigned with a constant matrix, and the value of the matrix is initialized empirically. It is very difficult to select a matching matrix in practical applications. For this problem, in this paper, the covariance matrix of the random walk model is adaptively adjusted online based on the innovation covariance matching technique, and an adaptive Two-Stage Unscented Kalman Filter (ATSUKF) is proposed to solve the fault diagnosis problem of the IMU. The simulation experiment compares the IMU fault diagnosis performance of OTSUKF and ATSUKF, and verifies the effectiveness of the proposed adaptive method.


2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-43
Author(s):  
Kazuhiro Funato ◽  
Ryosuke Tasaki ◽  
Hiroto Sakurai ◽  
Kazuhiko Terashima ◽  
◽  
...  

The authors have been developing a mobile robot to assist doctors in hospitals in managing medical tools and patient electronic medical records. The robot tracks behind a mobile medical worker while maintaining a constant distance from the worker. However, it was difficult to detect objects in the sensor’s invisible region, called occlusion. In this study, we propose a sensor fusion method to estimate the position of a robot tracking target indirectly by an inertial measurement unit (IMU) in addition to the direct measurement by an laser range finder (LRF) and develop a human tracking system to avoid occlusion by a mobile robot. Based on this, we perform detailed experimental verification of tracking a specified person to verify the validity of the proposed method.


Author(s):  
Rui Li ◽  
Barclay Jumet ◽  
Hongliang Ren ◽  
WenZhan Song ◽  
Zion Tsz Ho Tse

The recent advancement of motion tracking technology offers better treatment tools for conditions, such as movement disorders, as the outcome of the rehabilitation could be quantitatively defined. The accurate and fast angular information output of the inertial measurement unit tracking systems enables the collection of accurate kinematic data for clinical assessment. This article presents a study of a low-cost microelectromechanical system inertial measurement unit-based tracking system in comparison with the conventional optical tracking system. The system consists of seven microelectromechanical system inertial measurement units, which could be mounted on the lower limbs of the subjects. For the feasibility test, 10 human participants were instructed to perform three different motions: walking, running, and fencing lunges when wearing specially designed sleeves. The subjects’ lower body movements were tracked using our inertial measurement unit-based system and compared with the gold standard—the NDI Polaris Vega optical tracking system. The results of the angular comparison between the inertial measurement unit and the NDI Polaris Vega optical tracking system were as follows: the average cross-correlation value was 0.85, the mean difference of joint angles was 2.00°, and the standard deviation of joint angles was ± 2.65°. The developed microelectromechanical system–based tracking system provides an alternative low-cost solution to track joint movement. Moreover, it is able to operate on an Android platform and could potentially be used to assist outdoor or home-based rehabilitation.


2020 ◽  
pp. 002029402091770
Author(s):  
Li Xing ◽  
Xiaowei Tu ◽  
Weixing Qian ◽  
Yang Jin ◽  
Pei Qi

The paper proposes an angular velocity fusion method of the microelectromechanical system inertial measurement unit array based on the extended Kalman filter with correlated system noises. In the proposed method, an adaptive model of the angular velocity is built according to the motion characteristics of the vehicles and it is regarded as the state equation to estimate the angular velocity. The signal model of gyroscopes and accelerometers in the microelectromechanical system inertial measurement unit array is used as the measurement equation to fuse and estimate the angular velocity. Due to the correlation of the state and measurement noises in the presented fusion model, the traditional extended Kalman filter equations are optimized, so as to accurately and reliably estimate the angular velocity. By simulating angular rates in different motion modes, such as constant and change-in-time angular rates, it is verified that the proposed method can reliably estimate angular rates, even when the angular rate has been out of the microelectromechanical system gyroscope measurement range. And results show that, compared with the traditional angular rate fusion method of microelectromechanical system inertial measurement unit array, it can estimate angular rates more accurately. Moreover, in the kinematic vehicle experiments, the performance advantage of the proposed method is also verified and the angular rate estimation accuracy can be increased by about 1.5 times compared to the traditional method.


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