Analog Devices' Inertial Sensor Reduces Cost And Complexity Of Industrial Motion Control Designs

The ADIS16365 can be used anywhere high-performance motion control and feedback is required. In vehicles that rely on GPS satellite navigation to maintain accurate position information, such as high-end agricultural equipment, the IMU enhances their performance by immediately detecting small shifts in the position of the GPS antenna due to rough terrain. This allows for real-time signal correction and provides the highest degree of heading accuracy. Additionally, a vehicle-mounted camera or a factory automation robotic arm can rely on the ADIS16365’s fast response time and excellent stability to maintain ultra-fine resolution even under erratic conditions.

“Most inertial motion sensors available today offer a low level of integration and require a high degree of factory calibration,” said Andy Garner, product line director for iSensor intelligent sensor products, Analog Devices. “The ADIS16365 comes fully calibrated and compensated for temperature, voltage and other sensitivities. This means customers receive meaningful data from the device immediately, without requiring additional motion testing or system integration. With its improved stability and feature-rich interface, the ADIS16365 significantly reduces the cost, time and risk of implementation for our customers. The new IMU fills the considerable void between large, expensive IMUs and less integrated sensors that leave much of the design testing and cost burden to the customer.”

ADIS16365 Provides Superior, Accessible and Affordable Performance IMU sensor implementation involves complex electro-mechanical design, including many sensor-to-sensor and environmental interdependencies. Traditional solutions are more expensive and also highly customized to a narrow class of applications. The factory calibrated and programmable ADIS16365 simplifies the process of implementing full IMU sensor capability, and provides affordable, precision 6 DoF sensing to the broadest range of customers and applications. The device includes several unique features that further reduce design time and complexity, including an automatic sensor point-of-reference realignment, digital range scaling, dynamic environmental compensation, autonomous self test, and embedded sensor condition monitoring. The device leverages Analog Devices’ proprietary motion and calibration testing processes to capture sensor data and alignment compensations across all three axes, which are then embedded within the IMU, along with calibration for voltage variances, temperature variances, and other influences, all of which are then dynamically compensated in-use and are transparent to the user.

The ADIS16365 is backwards compatible with other iSensor 6 DoF sensors and includes a faster data access interface, additional system I/O, a higher dynamic range accelerometer (17g), and an extended temperature range of –40 degrees C to +105 degrees C.

Harnessing ADI’s MEMS Expertise for Six-Degrees-of-Freedom Motion Designed using Analog Devices’ world-class iMEMS Motion Signal Processing Technology™, the ADIS16365 IMU combines three gyroscopes and three accelerometers to provide 6 DoF motion sensing. With the aid of embedded features such as the Precision AutoNull, and an outstanding 0.05o/sec/g dynamic linear acceleration compensation factor, equipment designers can achieve in-run bias stability of 0.009o/sec or better without having to perform further motion testing. For industrial applications, the ADIS16365 achieves unprecedented performance levels and significantly reduces post-processing complexity and implementation cost for the system designer. The new IMU sensor includes a programmable SPI (serial peripheral interface) port that provides easy access to device features, such as digital filtering, sample-rate, power-management, self-test, and sensor condition status and alarms. The sensor, smaller than a 1-inch cube, is footprint-compatible with previous generations. With only power supply and SPI connections, the device is fully in-system tunable, allowing designers to quickly and easily debug their system and experiment with different configurations for design optimization.