IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit) integration for the navigation and positioning of autonomous robot systems

An autonomous robot needs to be able to position itself in a given surrounding environment and to be able to accomplish a given navigational goal. This paper presents the integration of an Inertial Measurement Unit for the navigation and localization of an autonomous robot system. A generic control architecture is used for the CoRoBa architecture, using servant object component interfaces like Sensor, Processor, and Actuator, inherited from the Service interface abstraction based on the TAO implementation of the communication middleware CORBA. Different data integration modes were overviewed using several Kalman Filter implementations. The integration process for the Microstrain 3DM-GX2 IMU and the robot localization were designed for the ROBUDEM robot platform, and implemented as CoRoBa sensor and processor modules.