Implementation and Experimentation of an Embedded Data Acquisition/Preprocessing System Based on a Hybrid Reconfigurable Hardware Accelerator for Inertial Measurements

Abstract

The use of microelectromechanical systems' sensors is growing steadily since it is the cheapest way to get information about the inertial state of a moving object. However, preprocessing inertial data using hybrid reconfigurability is challenging. This article is an analysis of the noise generated by a multisensory data acquisition and preprocessing system that has been implemented to interface inertial sensors (particularly accelerometers and gyroscopes). A multichannel reconfigurable voltage attenuator (MRVA) based on the field-programmable analog array, an alternative to classical voltage dividers, has been created to interface the sensors with the field-programmable gate array. This article describes a hardware accelerator implementation of two calibration/denoising processes based on the moving average filters in order to select the best choice for the preparation of inertial measurement units data, where a precision of 99.72% was reached. The MRVA is interfaced via Xilinx analog-to-digital converter, where an intellectual property has been designed for hardware acceleration using Xilinx system generator.