The Italian company is based in Latium Region. It is an innovative startup that designs and produces high end Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) with innovative ideas, mostly for navigation and orientation systems. The developed IMU System is a new generation of motion sensor that combines temperature compensated, accelerometer, gyroscopes and magnetometers. It provides accurate heave motion, velocity, acceleration and angular rotation.
A traditional adaptive heave model estimates one dominant frequency, thus for a complicated motion (that combines multiple frequencies) the performance of the period estimation degrades and the calculation error increase. To overcome this limitation, the SME offers an enhanced dynamic adaptive filter, in this model heave parameter is automatically tuned to better adapt with the change in the motion frequency.
This IMU has these specific tasks:
• Measure Euler angles. roll, pitch, yaw, which is three angles that describe the orientation of a rigid body in the space with respect to a fixed coordinate system;
• linear velocities and the linear accelerations;
• heave motion for marine applications.
Accurate heave measurements are extremely important in the application of marine field to actively compensate for wave motion of a ship. Active heave compensation (AHC) systems require an accurate estimate of the vertical vessel motion in order to decouple the offshore crane’s lift operation from the motion of the vessel. In this device the heave motion is estimated based on measurements from the accelerometers using an adaptive heave filter. The custom Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) guarantees high accuracy and no latency heave estimation.
These motion sensors are being used in a wide range of applications, such as:
• Gimbals systems stabilization in drones and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV).
• Offshore oil & gas industry.
• Hydro-graphic survey.
• Helideck monitoring systems, crane monitoring systems.
• Active heave compensation systems (AHC) for marine applications.
• Robotics
• Smart agriculture and renewable energy.
The device is available in an OEM (original equipment manufacturer) package suitable for integration into larger products or an enclosed package for external and standalone use. The company is now expanding globally and is looking for resellers with the competence to sell the device.
Advantages and Innovations The device offers low cost, high accuracy IMU solutions, achieved by the FPGA & DSP (Digital Signal Processor) integration in the electronic design. FPGA offers a whole new level of real time performance and filtering excellence. The platform is taking advantage of real hardware circuitry, allowing extremely low latency measurements and estimation. With focusing on data processing and noise filtering and not extremely high cost gyroscopes and accelerometers the device has achieved high performance at low cost and small size. An advanced distributed parallel calculation algorithm delivers the maximum performance of the unit.