A Study on IMU Sampling Rate Mismatch for a Wireless Synchronized Platform

The paper presents a study on the effects of the timing error sources in Multi IMU (MIMU) synchronized systems. In fact, the use of the IMU internal FIFO or the IMU interrupt feature for gathering new data, lead to incomplete or completely incorrect results. The paper addresses the issue of guaranteeing the perfect synchronization for each acquired sample. The proposed sensor network has a star topology with a single master that acts as a time coordinator for the slaves of its subnetwork. A system composed by a master and eight slaves is used for the experiments. The obtained results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed solution; the perfect synchronization between the slaves and the right sampling is achieved in a long time acquisition.