Evaluation of a solid-state gyroscope for robotics applications

The evaluation of a low-cost solid-state gyroscope for robotics applications is described. An error model for the sensor is generated and included in a Kalman filter for estimating the orientation of a moving robot vehicle. Orientation estimation with the error model is compared to the performance when the error model is excluded from the system. The results demonstrate that without error compensation, the error in idealization is between 5-15°/min but can be improved at least by a factor of 5 if an adequate error model is supplied. Like all inertial systems, the platform requires additional information from some absolute position-sensing mechanism to overcome long-term drift. However, the results show that with careful and detailed modeling of error sources, inertial sensors can provide valuable orientation information for mobile robot applications