Evaluation of Smartphone IMUs for Small Mobile Search and Rescue Robots

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the use of smartphone IMUs for small search and rescue robots, demonstrating their potential as cost-effective sensors through experiments comparing them with professional IMUs.

Contribution

It presents a method to use ROS on Android devices and provides an experimental comparison of smartphone and professional IMUs for mobile robots.

Findings

Smartphone IMUs show promising accuracy under certain conditions.

Experiments demonstrate feasibility of using smartphones as main sensors.

Comparison highlights strengths and limitations of smartphone IMUs.

Abstract

Small mobile robots are an important class of Search and Rescue Robots. Integrating all required components into such small robots is a difficult engineering task. Smartphones have already been made small, lightweight and cheap by the industry and are thus an excellent candidate as main controller for such robots. In this paper we outline how ROS can be used on Android devices and then evaluate one sensor which is very important for mobile robots: the Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU). Experiments are performed under static and dynamic conditions to measure the error of the IMUs of three smartphones and three professional IMUs. In the experiments we make use of a tracking system and an autonomous mobile robot.