Investigation of Timing Behavior and Jitter in a Smart Inertial Sensor Debugging Architecture

Area of Science:

• Electrical Engineering
• Computer Science
• Robotics

Background:

• The increasing integration of microprocessors drives the demand for smart inertial sensors.
• Software development for smart sensors presents significant challenges due to complex hardware integration.
• Real-time processing and accurate timing are critical for advanced inertial sensor applications.

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose and evaluate a novel Sensor-in-the-Loop (SiL) architecture for smart inertial sensor development.
• To enable repeatable and reproducible testing of sensor firmware on actual hardware using prerecorded data.
• To analyze the timing behavior, specifically timing and jitter, of the proposed SiL approach.

Main Methods:

• Development of a Sensor-in-the-Loop architecture for real-time data injection during debugging.
• Implementation of a system capable of injecting data from three 3-Degrees-of-Freedom (3-DOF) sensors at 1.6 kHz.
• Utilization of Gage R&R analysis and confidence intervals to validate experimental results and statistical significance.

Main Results:

• The SiL architecture successfully facilitates the testing and evaluation of sensor firmware functionality and timing.
• The implemented SiL approach demonstrates a jitter at least three times lower compared to using real sensor data.
• The system can handle data injection for multiple sensors at a high frequency (1.6 kHz).

Conclusions:

• The proposed Sensor-in-the-Loop architecture offers a robust solution for the challenges in smart inertial sensor software development.
• This approach enhances the repeatability and reproducibility of firmware testing, crucial for high-integration sensor systems.
• The SiL method provides superior timing performance with significantly reduced jitter, making it suitable for future demanding applications.