The next peripheral to get working on the quad’s raspberry pi interface board is the IMU. When operating, the IMU will primarily be used to determine attitude and angular pitch and roll rates.  Secondarily, it will determine yaw rate, although there is no provision within the IMU to determine absolute yaw.

To accomplish this, the board has a BMI088 6 axis accelerometer and gyroscope attached via SPI to the auxiliary STM32G4 along with discrete connections for interrupts.  This chip has 16 bit resolution for both sensors, decent claimed noise characteristics, and supposedly the ability to better reject high frequency vibrations as seen in robotic applications.  I am currently running the gyroscope at 1kHz, and the accelerometer at 800Hz.  The IMU is driven off the gyroscope, with the accelerometer sampled whenever the gyroscope has new data available.

My first step was just to read out the 6 axis values at full rate to measure the static performance characteristics.  After doing that overnight, I got the following Allan Variance plot.

That gives the angular random walk at around 0.016 dps / sqrt(Hz) with a bias stability of around 6.5 deg/hr.  The angular random walk is about what is specified in the datasheet, and the bias is not specified at all, but this seems really good for a MEMS sensor.  In fact, it is good enough I could probably just barely gyrocompass, measuring the earth’s rotation, with a little patience.  The accelerometer values are shown there too, and seem fine, but aren’t all that critical.

Next up is turning this data into an attitude and rate estimate.