International Symposium on Intelligent Information Technology Application Workshops

Design of Data Acquisition and Processing System for IMU

Chunpeng Kang1, Zhong Su 2
1
Institute of Intelligence Control，
Beijing Information Science and Technology University, Beijing, 100101, China
2
Institute of Intelligence Control，
Beijing Information Science and Technology University, Beijing, 100101, China
yongren2006@126.com, sz@bistu.edu.cn

Abstract high-speed data acquisition and processing system with low-

Inertia Measurement Unit (IMU), which is mainly used to
measure triaxial acceleration and angular velocity, is an
important part of the navigation control system. Data
acquisition for gyroscopes and acceleration in IMU is
primarily explored. A design scheme based on AT91RM9200
and embedded Linux operating system is introduced. Before
analogy signals from IMU are imported into A/D converter,
they should be filtered by pre-treatment circuit, and then
processed by Micro-computer. Lastly, direction and attitude
can be exported through RS232.System driver is developed by
Linux, and software compiler mainly employs U-boot 1.3.
When the supply power is ± 5 V, compare with the data from
system and Fluke 8845A with high accuracy. It’s proved that
the data acquisition system is achieved the needs of design.
Moreover, the system is small in size, low in power
consumption, and good in stability and practicality. In the
military field, it has a wide use.
1. Introduction
IMU contains three gyroscopes and three accelerometers.
Input axises of these sensitive components is configured in 3D
direction according to roller, pitch and yaw axis of flight
carrier, which comes into being a three-dimensional inertial
coordinate system. In strapdown inertial navigation systems,
inertial components are riveted in the carrier, which makes the
inertial coordinate system parallel with the flight carrier
coordinate system. Output vector information of gyroscopes
and accelerometers is attitude and course relating with inertial
space. Therefore, IMU data acquisition and processing in the
navigation control system is extraordinarily importance. In
recent years, with the DSP, ARM technology developing,
people also make more require, such as smaller size, lower
power consumption, higher accuracy, reliability, and dynamic.
Data acquisition is an important means of access to data, it
is a process that measured from the sensor equipment or other
analog or digital units collected information automatically.
Based on AT91RM9200 as the core processor, design an IMU
cost, small size, low power consumption, good stability.
2. Scheme Design
According strapdown inertial navigation system
requirements, the accelerometers and gyroscopes transmits
signal to A/D conversion module, and AT92RM9200
microprocessor receive input information from A/D
module ,through attitude arithmetic, data integration, it gets
direction and attitude, and real-time data is transmitted
through the serial port. AT91RM9200 is configured an
erasable memory, it can store attitude arithmetic programme
debugged but also can be used to store the collected data, thus,
it greatly enhances practicability of the IMU. Overall
hardware structure of the system as shown in Figure 1:
3. Hardware structure
3.1 IMU pretreatment circuit
IMU output signal is very weak, and much interference.
The noise contains too much random noise. In order to ensure
data accuracy. So it must be filtered to weak the high
harmonics or higher frequency interference and the noise
before sampling.
The system uses active filter circuit which constitutes
integrated operational amplifier, R and C components. So the
system has advantage of no inductors, small size, and light
weight. Integrated operational amplifier open-loop voltage
gain and input impedance are high, the output resistor is small.
So it plays a role of voltage amplification and buffer.
3.2 CPU Module
The AT91RM9200 is a complete system-on-chip built
around the ARM920T ARM Thumb processor, which includes
Memory Management Unit, 8-KByte Data Cache and 16-
KByte Instruction Cache. Working in 180MHZ, the
computing speed can up to 200MHZ. And it incorporates a
rich set of system and application peripherals and standard

978-0-7695-3505-0/08 $25.00 © 2008 IEEE 585

DOI 10.1109/IITA.Workshops.2008.82
interfaces in order to provide a single-chip solution for a wide
range of compute-intensive applications that require maximum
functionality at minimum power consumption at lowest cost.
The ARM9TDMI is a member of the ARM family of
general-purpose microprocessors. It supports both the 32-bit
ARM and 16-bit Thumb instruction sets, allowing the user to
trade off between high performance and high code density.
And it also supports the ARM debug architecture and includes
logic to assist in both hardware and software debug.
Gyroscope
8bit
Pre-treatment
Circuit
Acceleration
8bit
IMU
16-bit A / D
Temperature converter
Compensation
Fig-1. Overall hardware structure
FLASH ROM is used to storage bootstrap program,
the kernel of operating system and applications. Select
two 16 M × 8, the expansion of 32 M ROM, the room is
assigned to the NCS0 address space of the AT91RM9200.
SDRAM is used to temporarily memory operating
system and related data in running system.
In order to improve the speed, two 32 M × 8, the
expansion of the 64 M SDRAM, the room is assigned to
the NCS1 address space of the AT91RM9200.
3.3 A / D Converter
There is much more data needed to acquire, and the
real-time requirement is relatively high, so the MAXIM
MAX1168 chip is employed to design. The MAX1168
low-power, multichannel, 16-bit analog-to-digital
converters (ADCs) feature a successive-approximation
ADC, integrated +4.096V reference, a reference buffer,
an internal oscillator, automatic power-down.
AIN0~7: Analog input.
DIN: Serial Data Input. Use DIN to communicate with
the command/configuration/control
Register. In SPI/QSPI/MICROWIRE mode, the rising
edge of SCLK clocks in data at DIN.
DOUT: Serial data output. When it was high, DOUT is
the high resistance state.
DSEL: Data-Bit Transfer-Select Input. Logic low on
DSEL places the device in 8-bit-wide data transfer mode.
Logic high places the device in 16-bit-wide data-transfer
mode. Do not leave DSEL unconnected.
586
The AT91RM9200 incorporates a high-speed on-chip
SRAM workspace, and a low-latency External Bus Interface
(EBI) for seamless connection to whatever configuration of
off-chip memories and memory-mapped peripherals is
required by the application. The EBI incorporates controllers
for synchronous DRAM (SDRAM), Burst Flash and Static
memories and features specific circuitry facilitating the
interface for NAND Flash/SmartMedia and Compact Flash.
SDRAM
Direction
AT91RM9200
RS232
Attitude
FLASH
SCLK: Serial clock input. When the device work in the
external clock mode, SCLK control entire conversion
process and the output data.
E O C : End-of-Conversion Output. In internal clock
mode, a logic low at EOC signals the end of a conversion
with the result available at DOUT. In external clock mode,
EOC remains high.
Connect SCLK port to IRQ4SPCK/PA2 pin of ARM.
AT91RM9200 produce crystal to drive the MAX1168
chip. DOUT and DIN pin connect with MOSI and MISO
pins of AT91RM9200 respectively. The chip-select signal
is generated by the PCSO, Schematic is as follows (Fig-2):
3.4 Serial Communication Interface
RS-232, called asynchronous ports or a COM
(communications) ports, is used to communicate with the
PC. On the one hand, PC real-time receives parameters,
such as direction and attitude. On the other hand, the
direction and attitude of the working parameters can be
set through the PC. Owing to the output voltage of
S3C44B0X is from 0 to 3.3 V, it doesn’t match with
RS232 standards voltage, so it’s necessary to do electrical
conversion. The system employs MAX3232 chip to
achieve this function in the paper, Schematic is as follows
(Fig-3):
 Start up

Initial ports and register

Wait /CS=0?

Fig.-2 A / D Converter Circuit Data Acquisition

Fig.-5 Flow chart of Data Acquisition

Start up

Induct from ROM

Fig.-3 Serial Communication Interface Circuit

4. Some Common Mistakes Check Normally N

4.1Flow chart of the main software system

The flow chart is showed as in Fig-4.

(1) Design of transplantation main program and
Load Linux EMS memory，drive
operating system program，Run main process
The design of the system main program is developed
object / host mode, compile in environment of cross
compiler of host, generate executable binary files in target
board, download to the target board through serial ports
and implement. Development environment uses ARM- User Setup
Linux cross compiler environment (cross-2.95.3), Linux
kernel is Linux-2.4.19, System cross-compiler
environment establish under the host Data Acquisition
usr/local/arm/2.95.3/bin.
(2) U-boot Compile
U-boot.1.3 is used to design this system, because it
Data Storage
comes with drivers of Ethernet interface chip and serial
ports. It needs to make configuration modified in structure
directory accord with hardware configuration, and then
performance make clean; make proper; make
at91rm9200dac-config; make all, the system can be End
generated the binary image file U-boot. bin adapted with
this system.
Fig.-4 Flow chart of the main software system
4.2 Data Acquisition Software Design
5. System Testing

587

There is some problems in debugging the circuit, such
as the A/D conversion result is nonlinear and one channel
disturbing another channel. It is find that these problems
were caused by too short delay of control signal, so these
problems can resolved in software.
The power supplies of data acquisition system is ± 5 V.
Serial port program of upper computer is programmed by
MFC.It’s used to receive 6-way data from the gyroscopes
and accelerometers. At the same time, employ a high
accuracy multimeter to receive the data, and the
multimeter is adopted FUKE 8845A, which has 6.5 digital
resolution. Then compare the data with PC data to correct
the system to zero. We can see the data from TABLE I.
[5] Zhu, Xin-Hua , Xia, Yun-Xiang; Wan, De-Jun .Design of
data acquisition system in distributed strapdown attitude
reference system. Chinese Journal of Sensors and Actuators,
v 19, n 3, June, 2006, p 741~745
[6] Wang. Wei-feng, Yu Hai-xun, Design on Embedded Data
Acquisition System Based on AT91RM9200 Microcomputer
Application Vol.23,No.10.2007 12~15
[7] Hongbing Xiao,Shiyi Li,Qiang Shen . Automatic
Positioning of Spinning Projectile in Trajectory Correction
Fuze via GPS/IMU Integration. Mechatronics and
Automation, 2007, 5-8 Aug. 2007, 717-722

6. Conclusion
From the table we obtained, the data are high accuracy,
and real-time is fully satisfied the requirements of attitude
measurement. At the same time, replacing the A/D
converter, digital filtering and increased compensation
algorithm can further improve the system accuracy.
TABLE I Data Compared
Fluke System
8845A Acquisition
1 0.02123 0.021656
2 0.50374 0.504125
3 1.00343 1.003813
4 1.5043 1.504680
5 2.0010 2.001271
6 2.5050 2.505280
7 2.9981 2.998257
8 3.4988 3.498840
9 4.0067 4.006650

Acknowledgements
This work is supported by Fund of Beforehand
Research of National Defense.
Grant #9140A09020507DZ0301in China.

References
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