Use of Consumer-Grade MEMS Inertial Sensors for Accurate Attitude Determination of Drones

The paper presents an integrated inertial measurement unit based on an innovative redundant configuration of low-cost Micro-Electro-Mechanical Sensors for small unmanned aircraft systems. The prototype developed consists of six different IMU in a cubic configuration with triaxial gyroscopes, accelerometers, and magnetometers. The redundancy allows improving the performance of the system because of the mutual calibration of single sensors. The performance of the prototype are preliminarily assess through short flight sessions. The attitude measures obtained from multiple-IMU turns out to be compliant with requirements for drone navigation.