Identification of Multiple faults in an Inertial Measurement Unit

This paper deals with the diagnostic design of an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU). IMU are widely used for system positioning. Their goal is to sense the attitude (or orientation) of a rigid body on which the IMU is embedded. In this paper, the sensors used in the IMU are a tri-axis accelerometer, a tri-axis magnetometer and 3 rate gyros. The diagnostic method proposed in this paper is independent of the physical system in which the IMU is embedded. This makes the diagnostic results very robust to disturbances or to imprecise knowledge of physical parameters. Moreover, the method proposed allows multiple faults isolation and identification. The simulation results are obtained with Matlab/Simulink.