Development of Highly Accurate IoT-Ready Quaternion-based 3D Gradiometer based on COTS IMUs

This paper introduces a Quaternion-based rotational representation of low power, low resource, commercial-of-the-shelf (COTS) IMU sensors, offering high accuracy, reliability and real time performance. A critical aspect of this work is the distributed implementation of the proposed solution that facilitates its integration with IoT platforms utilizing the MQTT communication protocol while efficiently applying a modified Madgwick's filter implementation to extract the sensor's orientation and rotation. Based on the proposed solution, sensor orientation outperforms conventional implementations based on previously widely applied methods like Euler Angles and effectively tackles important shortcomings such as a sluggish response and issues like Gimbal Lock. Comprehensive, experimental evaluation reveals that the proposed solution yields state-of-the-art accuracy, while being deployed on a typical, low-cost COTS sensor while delay measurements indicate a highly reliable and time constrained performance adequate for a wide range of real life scenarios.