Angle measurements for mobile robots with filtering of short-term noise in MEMS gyroscopes

Abstract

This paper presents a simple, yet very effective filtering method to suppress short-term broadband noise in micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS) gyros for yaw angle measurement with minimized drift. This method is suitable for autonomous indoor mobile robots that use two low-cost sensors: an inertial one, which uses a gyroscope, and an odometric one, which uses encoders mounted on the vehicle’s wheels. The main idea of the proposed approach is consists of two phases: (1) a threshold filter for translational motions, and (2) a moving average filter for rotational motions to reject the broadband noise component that affects short-term performance. Experimental results with the proposed phased method applied to an Epson XV3500 MEMS gyro demonstrate that it effectively suppresses short-term broadband noise and yields accurate yaw angle with minimized drift.