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MEMS motion tracker features gyroscopes and full navigation engine

By Anonymous

August 11, 2004 -- The IMT6000, manufactured by www.imego.com of Sweden, is the first ultra light INS device able to track motion for 10 seconds with positional accuracy, in x,y,z coordinates, of a few centimeters and angular accuracy surpassing 0.3 degrees. The IMT6000 can track velocity during 20 seconds of motion to within 0.01 m/s.

The system consists of a 60 gram IMU sensor head that collects, digitizes, stores and transmits all sensory data. A stand-by laptop receives the digital information via a BlueTooth link and computes all requested motion parameters, including positions and angles for all degrees of freedom. The complete motion event is captured and can be replayed in minute detail, with resolutions of several hundred samples per second.

The digital IMU sensor head builds on commercial micro machined gyros and accelerometers that are boosted with noise removal algorithms to reach noise levels of 0.005 deg/s/rootHz and 60ug/rootHz, throughout the generous measuring ranges of 3600 deg/s and 50 g. Another important parameter for motion tracking is the bias stability of the sensors. The IMT6000 is capable of stabilities down to 10 deg/hr and 100 ug. All sensors are sampled at 2.7 kHz and filtered in several stages to finally display information with 200Hz resolution.

www.imego.com
Imego is an independent contract research organization engaged in sensor system development as well as prototype production for industry. The company is specialized in micro-sensor systems within the fields of MEMS, biotechnology, magnetism and photonics.

Imego developed the IMT6000 and can customize this INS platform to a particular application as per customer’s specifications. Imego also develops and customizes sensor elements, sensor systems, and their packaging to satisfy further product requirements.

Applications
Imego’s motion trackers are currently primarily tuned to sports applications, focusing on explosive events that take on the order of a few seconds to complete. The IMT6000 measures, computes and displays all six motion parameters for all motion directions and all discrete time steps. The x,y,z accelerations, velocities, positions, angular accelerations, angular velocities, and angles then completely describe the motion and give the most accurate scientific description of the event that can be had.

Imego’s specialty is to take advantage of the general knowledge about a particular motion and customizing the device to limit the small errors inherent in fine grained motion tracking. For example, knowing that a race car always turns left on a track, we can tune the gyro scale factors accordingly, dramatically enhancing performance of the tracking. If the NASCAR circuit decided to switch directions one day, then that particular Imego motion tracker would have to be recalibrated. Another example is the understanding that almost all tennis players hold their racket nearly horizontal just before starting the serve motion. This kind of information can be exploited to determine specific sensor- and navigation parameters, which in the end improves navigation precision. Imego also uses advanced sensory calibration in a temperature controlled precision rate table, making it possible to compensate for non-linear behavior and temperature dependencies always present in MEMS sensors. The overall result is improved accuracy of all motion parameters, eclipsing tracking predictions based purely on manufacturer’s sensor specifications.

Beyond the world of sports, applications range from black boxes for industrial robots, precision positioning of film cameras, and accurate location of drill heads to computer animation and biomechanics. Basically, the IMT6000 can be applied whenever the problem entails measuring any motion parameter, while it at the same time is essential to use a sensor head that is small and light enough not to disturb the actual motion.

One prime example is Imego’s development of a light but accurate position measuring instrument, the GPS Shadow Explorer (GSE). Geodesic applications require a small and light instrument that quickly measures out a few unknown locations when not enough satellites are visible in the sky to use GPS. The GSE can then simply pinpoint the x,y,z coordinates, with the precision of a few centimeters, as long as each point can be reached within 25 seconds of walking from the known GPS coordinate.

Further Research and Development
In a research project, partly financed by SAAB Bofors Dynamics and SensoNor, Imego has developed a novel electronics platform, including a fully digital gyro ASIC, which boosts SensoNor’s low cost automotive gyroscope to good tactical grade performance. The combination of new ASIC and commercial gyro succeeded in resolving the rotation of the Earth, about 15?/hr, in late Q2 2004. This achievement further confirms Imego’s position as one of the world’s leading MEMS gyro research and prototyping companies. Less than a handful of research groups have previously been able to demonstrate this performance for silicon MEMS gyros before, and none for a low cost automotive gyro in commercial production.

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How to Easily Create a Search-Engine Friendly Navigation Menu For Your Website

By Fabian Lim

A navigation menu is an important element of a website.

A good navigation menu helps your visitors navigate through your website efficiently - in as few mouse-clicks as possible.

You can think of a website navigation menu like the "Table of Contents" of a book.

And the greater the number of web pages on your website, the more important the role of a website navigation menu.

Another important benefit of a navigation menu is it optimizes the internal linking structure of your website and allows the navigation menu links to rank better in search engines, since all web pages will be pointing to it.

(For example, if your website has 1000 web pages, each navigation menu link will have 1000 web pages pointing to it. This will result in the navigation menu links ranking higher than the other web pages)

Here's how you can use this knowledge to improve the search-engine rankings of selected web pages - Simply include the selected web pages as links in the navigation menu and you'll automatically have the rest of the web pages pointing to them.

And finally, here's one method you can use to easily create a website navigation menu - Using Server Side Includes (SSI).

What are Server Side Includes?
------------------------------
Server Side Includes (SSI) are simply instructions (also known as "directives") that are included in a HTML document to execute a specific command e.g. inserting the content of an HTML file.

The SSI directives are "processed" at the Server side, before it reaches the requesting browser (hence the name Server Side Includes).

As a result, the "processed" SSI directives merge seamlessly with the HTML file.

Here's an example of SSI in action at a website (i.e. the left navigation menu): http://www.BizSuccessOnline.com.

Notice the left navigation menu is made up of static HTML links.

This is to allow search-engine spiders to crawl through the website to discover other web pages (via the navigation menu links).

An alternative solution to get your web pages spidered by search-engines is to use a sitemap.

A sitemap is simply a webpage that contains links to every webpage on your website and should be linked from your home page.

This will provide the search-engine spiders a path to follow and will ultimately result in your web pages getting fully indexed.

You can learn more about sitemaps here:
http://SiteMapSoftware.com

Note that most, but not all servers have SSI's enabled. Please check with your web host to find out whether SSI is enabled in your server.

How to Easily Create a Navigation Menu Using SSI? ------------------------------------------------- Step 1# - Create a HTML navigation menu file

This is the navigation menu file that will be inserted into your HTML pages and is also your HTML navigation menu template.

A simple horizontal text HTML navigation menu can look like this:

Home | Products | Pricing | About Us | Contact Us

(You'll need to hyperlink each of the above text to make these navigation links clickable by using your favorite HTML editor e.g. FrontPage or Dreamweaver)

You need to save this file with a .shtml extension once this file has been created e.g. topnavi.shtml

Step 2# - Insert navigation menu file into HTML file

Open up the HTML file (e.g. products.html) and place the cursor on the location where you wish to insert the navigation menu.

Click here to view the SSI directive:
http://BizSuccessOnline.com/SSI_CodeSnippet

And copy and paste the above SSI directive at the cursor.

(Be sure to replace "your_navigation_filename.shtml" with the name of your navigation menu file)

Note: You CANNOT use absolute path with an SSI directive: e.g. do not use http://yourdomain.com/topnavi.shtml

And finally, save the HTML file with a .shtml extension e.g. products.shtml

Step 3# - Upload files onto your server

The last step is to upload the newly created .shtml files onto your web server and check to make sure the pages display properly.

And if you view the HTML source code of your HTML file on a live internet connection, you'll notice that the SSI directive would have been replaced by the actual HTML navigation menu code.

Maintaining your navigation menu is now a simple matter of changing the contents on the navigation file.

That's all there is to it!

Give it a go!

Fabian Lim is a Management & Internet Marketing Consultant. He helps organizations and individuals succeed online. He is also editor and publisher of "BizSuccess Tips", a
No Hype, No B.S. internet marketing newsletter. Visit his website at http://www.BizSuccessOnline.com

This article courtesy of http://auto-gps-center.com/.
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your newsletter provided this courtesy notice and the author
name and URL remain intact.

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Keep your navigation consistent!

By Jamie Kiley

Learn the essential elements of effective site navigation. Find out what differentiates the good from the bad, and make sure visitors will always be able to find what they need.
One of the single most important aspects of effective navigation is consistency. Why? There's a simple reason.

Visitors want familiarity.

They are more comfortable and more trusting if they know things are going to remain the same from page to page. They have a certain sense of confidence from knowing what to expect.

If a visitor can quickly become familiar with your navigation, it's much simpler to actually navigate. And of course, that's the whole purpose of navigation, right?

Besides familiarity, there's a second reason to be consistent. It helps your credibility.

Consistency in your navigation helps you present a unified, cohesive image to your visitors. In other words, you look polished, well-thought-out, and on top of things. Your visitors get the impression that you "have it together".

On the other hand, if your navigation is inconsistent, it reflects badly on you and your company. You'll look disorganized and unprofessional.

Here are 3 ways to maintain consistency in your navigation:

1. Use global navigation (which is a set of your main links that appears on every page of your site in the same place).

Global navigation is an absolute necessity. It ensures that visitors can always get to the main sections of your website quickly and easily.

Global navigation options must be the same on every page. Many sites resoundingly fail in this area. Often, the order of the links varies from page to page, or some links are missing on certain pages. This confuses even experienced web users.

2. Keep the appearance and placement of buttons and secondary links the same throughout the site.

I recently ran across a site that used three completely different styles of buttons in as many pages. This variation blew any unified appearance they hoped to have. It also made it hard to recognize which graphics were links and which were not, since there was no consistently-used symbol for "clickability".

On another site, secondary navigation options were on the left on some pages and on the right on other pages. That's a no-no. Visitors will never be sure where to look for additional options, particularly since this site was visually busy. Don't move links around from page to page.

Link colors, button styles, fonts, and placement should be the same throughout the site. The goal should be for visitors to instantly recognize a link when they see it.

3. Stick with conventional design standards.

In addition to being consistent within your site, you also need to be consistent with other sites. Don't get too far out on the fringe in trying new things.

If you use a navigation scheme that's completely different from what you see on most other sites, visitors will likely be confused. Make your navigation look and function like something visitors will be familiar with from other sites.

About the Author

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