Using a MTi inertial sensor with LabView

[Hugo Tang]

Found it, Thx alot!

[smots]

My teammembers and I want to use the Xsens for measuring: roll, pitch and yaw and position in x,y and z ( speed or acceleration also works). This requires an adjustment to the program that we don`t know how do. Could anyone help us?

[Eric.M]

Hey smots,

By taking a look at the VI on page 1, you already have a layout for a basic program, and there are already some functions (invoke nodes) acquiring the positions and roll, yaw...

Unfortunately I guess we can't really build a program for you or your application, especially if we don't have any idea of what you need to do.

Regards,

Rik.

[smots]

Hey Eric

Thank you for your reaction. We want to adjust a model boat in its course (project for our university of applied sciences). Therefore we need to measure its yaw, x-movement and y-movement. We should be able to write the program needed to steer the boat ourselves. But we are not able of getting the data we want out of the sensor and in to the program because we don`t know how to communicate with the device. So we where hoping anyone could help us with it.

Regards,

Remco

P.S..

I`m Dutch so my English is not perfect 

[bmann2000]

I've used the VI from page 1 to communicate with a MTi-G to retrieve x,y,z,roll,pitch,yaw, no debug required.  The .pdf files on the xsense cd will give you more info.

[smots]

Hello

We have e-mailed the company of Xsens. We received a vi that should do the job. The only problem is that it gives us strange values. For example when we let the sensor at rest on a table, the graph shows its attitude increasing. A movement in the x of y position doesn`t affect the graph at all. Could anyone help us with this?

Regards,

Remco 

[smots]

P.S.

this is the vi

[bmann2000]

you need to read up on inertial nav, understand what's happening with the inertial sensors and the gps updates.  In short, it only really works well in motion as the gps cannot be used for a correction unless it's moved far enough, same way as your handheld hiking gps behaves.  To test out the nav unit and get an idea of the results, you need to conduct a car/van trial.  From there you can plot the nav results on to google maps.  When stationary, you'll always get drift.

Isn't that the same VI posted by TMorrisNY at the start of this thread?

[smots]

Thank you for your reaction. The problem is that we don`t know how to counter this drift. We aren`t making use of the gps system of the sensor. We only use the accelerorometer (at least we try to).

[bmann2000]

the processing of the nav data is beyond the scope of this thread, this thread is to discuss labview comms with the MTi xsense.  Try googling "nav drift xsense".  The whole area of inertial nav is quite technical and requires fairly advanced mathematics, on the plus side, it'll keep you busy for a long long time.