UKM-AUT23-PG28+29_Layout 1 09/08/2023 10:33 Page 29
SMART MANUFACTURING
NAVIGATION SENSING: GIVING MACHINES FEELING
As sensors proliferate on industrial machines, and the data available from them becomes richer, the significance of their location and relative motion increases as well. Autonomy often relates to mobility, and thus pinpointing a vehicle’s position, guiding a machine’s movement, and precisely steering their instruments are key enablers. Detecting such motion with precision allows more difficult and valuable application usage, where safety and reliability are demanded as well. The smart farm, for instance, is challenged to continually increase efficiencies in crop management, and locating instruments to within centimeters is the primary driver in conserving inputs and maximising outputs.
One approach to autonomous navigation is to leverage GNSS location services, which, while being ubiquitous, are also vulnerable to signal disruption. Full autonomy requires unrestricted operation, with no threat of blockage or temporary disruption. Inertial sensors offer a complementary motion measurement, free from disruption and the need for external infrastructure. A combination of linear and rotational sensors, on all three axes, is typically combined into a six degrees of freedom inertial measurement unit (IMU). The IMU’s outputs can be resolved with additional processing to provide relative attitude, heading, and velocity. This ultimately provides what is known as dead reckoning guidance.
A special class of inertial sensors are necessary to resolve the accuracy of centimeter
level positioning, or one-tenth of a degree of pointing angles. The output of consumer-level IMUs drift very quickly even in benign environments. They are not able to distinguish wanted motion from other error sources, including vibration and cross-axis disturbances. High performance inertial sensors have high stability in the range of 1°/hour, employ special sensor architectures to reject linear-g errors, and have been calibrated to compensate for temperature and alignment disturbances. This precision motion capture is done at 10× to 100× higher rates, compared to GPS and perception sensors, and thus is best able to replace the human instinctive motion sensing relied on in nonautonomous machines. The growth of this industrial revolution is dependent on the evolution of the underlying sensing technology supporting autonomy. The capability that radar, LIDAR, and cameras possess to precisely detect and classify objects at both short and long range will enable autonomous industrial vehicles to effectively see much like a human operator. In addition, inertial technology will be critical in providing gut feel or dead reckoning navigation to autonomous applications. The more precise the sensors are, the higher quality the data that is being fed into artificial intelligence is, and this ultimately leads to a safer and more efficient application.
Analog Devices
analog.com/autonomy
UKManufacturing Autumn 2023 29
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