IMU and vibration data

Help & Support Robot Parts
1

Hello,
How can we know if an IMU is suitable for vibration data measurements?

2

Hi there,

Welcome to the forum.

A hobby grade IMU might not be precise enough to track vibration… depending on the strength of the vibrations.

I would suggest this for sensing vibration: https://www.robotshop.com/en/catalogsearch/result/?q=vibration+sensor&order=relevance&dir=desc

Let me know if this helped.

3

Thank you for your reply,
Basically, I have this IMU MPU-9250A-01 with the following datasheet: http://www.invensense.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/PS-MPU-9250A-01-v1.1.pdf, and I would like to know if it is capable to measure the roughness of the road, so measuring the vibration of the vehicle (where this IMU is mounted) will give an idea on the smoothness of the ride.
The on-board accelerometer on the IMU has a sensitivity of 16,384 LSB/g at ±2g. Can we detect the vibration of the car (resulted from the road roughness and not from motor or wheel rotation) with this sensitivity?

I appreciate your help,

Many thanks,

Best

5

An IMU’s “raison d’être” is to track linear and angular acceleration, and in most applications, the data is used for absolute orientation (except for compass heading), measuring acceleration (and integrating to get linear and angular velocity). Many programs try to get rid of “noise” which can come from many places and is often not wanted. This having been said, IMUs are certainly used to measure vibration (ex. earthquakes), so it’s a question of the range of vibration (i.e. acceleration) you envision. 2g seems fine, though (surprising if your car can go beyond 19.8m/s^2). If you only need linear vibration, why choose an IMU (which includes a gyro)? What will be considerably harder will be creating an accurate “map” of the road based on the data (though yo didn’t indicate you needed this). You also wrote “detect the vibration of the car”, which means this will be after the dampening effect of the tires and the shock absorbers.

1 Like
6

Thank you for your reply, much appreciated!
I am using the IMU for other application on the car, and as it has an integrated accelerometer, I was wondering whether it could be use to acquire vibration data.

7

It should be able to - why not see what the raw output gives?