Tutorial Speakers

Micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) accelerometers are widely employed in consumer and tactical applications, but their use in navigation-grade applications, notably commercial air travel, remains limited by device performance.  MEMS accelerometers have yet to supplant the current gold standard for navigation-grade accelerometer technology, Honeywell's quartz accelerometer (QA) product line generally known as the Q-Flex.  However, the inertial sensor community has made great strides forward over the last 15 years and is likely on the brink of overcoming the final hurdles.  To help one understand recent progress and the remaining gaps in device performance, this tutorial will review navigation-grade accelerometer requirements, emphasize and elaborate upon some often overlooked performance aspects, and review technology advances made by the community that are approaching Q-Flex capabilities.

The quantum mechanical realm offers a new range of mechanisms and devices for inertial sensing and timekeeping, with applications to positioning, navigation, timekeeping and geodesy – as well as new means of imaging, computing and communicating securely.

Modern inertial sensor technology, combined with significantly increased computational power and memory availability, creates remarkable opportunities for improving system performance in position and orientation estimation. This tutorial explores the powerful synergy achieved by integrating advanced inertial sensors with state-of-the-art filtering techniques tailored to realistic conditions. Due to inherent noise in inertial measurements and cumulative error growth in traditional mechanizations, sophisticated stochastic filtering algorithms and careful consideration of application-specific constraints are essential. In the examples, inertial sensor raw data is propagated to tailored mechanizations and advanced filtering and estimation methods, leading to unprecedented accuracy.