Race Car Stabilization – Team StarCraft at the Formula Student Germany

26/08/2016
, Blog, Use Cases
Team Starcraft's race car

Team StarCraft’s race car

From August 8-14 Team StarCraft of German Technische Universität Ilmenau participated at the Formula Student Germany – International Design Competition. Among many other teams from around the world they took on various challenges including acceleration and endurance races. Sensors such as the IMU (inertial measurement unit) from LP-RESEARCH offered valuable data about air pressure, vertical acceleration and magnetic field strength, which the racing team needed to regulate their traction control in order to perform well. The students used our LPMS-CU to control the car’s Torque Vectoring and the Anti-slip Regulation (ASR).
For next year’s race they will be back with an even more refined car!

Our Next Generation of Low-cost IMU Devices Has Arrived

19/08/2016
, Blog, Product
The new LPMS CURS2 sensor

The new LPMS CURS2 sensor

 

We proudly launched the next generation of our LPMS inertial measurement units developed for fast and accurate 3D orientation sensing. LP-RESEARCH supports a variety of communication interfaces and housing options at low cost. Let us tell you more about the optimized features:

  • The new sensors are roughly half the size of the previous production, especially if you take a look at the new LPMS-B2.
  • Performance has been greatly increased in terms of accuracy. The noise level is now one third of the previous version.
  • Higher sampling rate: We were able to bring the sampling rate up to 400Hz.
  • The new sensors feature more types of data output, for example humidity.
  • Both LPMS-CANAL2 and LPMS-RS232AL2 are encased in a rugged aluminum housing and are waterproof up to 1m (IP67).
  • The first generation comprised seven sensors, now we increased the line to nine with greater variety.
  • Finally, thanks to a different manufacturing process, our new generation cost half or even less than half the price of the previous version.

Have a look at our LPMS product site over here.

Virtual Tape Measure with Google’s Project Soli

03/06/2016
, Blog, Projects

The folks at Google ATAP were so nice and allowed us to participate in the Project Soli alpha developer program. Please have a look at their website for more information about the project. Project Soli is a chip-sized miniature millimeter-wave radar, supported by a sophisticated DSP pipeline developed by Google. Based on this signal processing, it is possible to analyze and evaluate finger gestures in the vicinity of the sensor. This allows for new ways of human-device interaction.

We have spent some time with the developer kit and made an application called Virtual Tape Measure. Purpose of this demo application is to replace the need for a physical tape measure when e.g. checking the dimensions of table while shopping for furniture. This is a fairly simple application of the Soli technology. We are currently looking into further, more complex use cases. Please see the diagram below describing the basic functionality of the system.

Sensor Fusion for Virtual Reality Headset Tracking

31/05/2016
, Blog, Projects

In order to test the functionality of our sensor fusion algorithm for head-mounted-display pose estimation, we connected one of our IMUs (LPMS-CURS2), a Nexonar infrared (IR) beacon and a LCD display to a Baofeng headset. The high stability of the IR tracking and the orientation information from the IMU as input to the sensor fusion algorithm result in accurate, robust and reactive headtracking. See the figure below for details of the test setup. The video shows the resulting performance of the system.

Control of Autonomous Drone iHSMD

30/03/2016
, Blog, Use Cases

iHMSD is an autonomous, high-altitude glider developed by the European Space Agency (ESA) and Swiss companies Meteolabor, CSEM and Team SmartFish. Purpose of the project was to develop a light-weight, cost-efficient vehicle that can accurately navigate in extreme heights. The glider was towed up to 32km above ground level by weather balloons and then released to follow several waypoints and return safely to ground.

iHMSD test flight

Figure 1 – iHMSD flight test in good weather conditions over Switzerland.

High altitude flight tests were done at ESRANGE, Kiruna, Sweden. During the Swedish missions, the 1‑kg glider navigated through winds of almost 200 km/h, equivalent to a hurricane of category 4. Nonetheless, several very successful missions were flown, with the iHMSD vehicle reaching maximum speeds of almost Mach 0.9 and gathering many hours of flight data and video footage.

The iHMSD test flights reached a maximum altitude of 32000 meters and supersonic speed (1070 km/h).

LPMS-CURS was used by the team to measure exposure of the vehicle to strong accelerations and rotations. A control algorithm was implemented to adjust the steering of the glider to guarantee the accurate navigation of the prescribed waypoints.

Figure 2 – Together with other control electronics LPMS-CURS was installed in iHMSD to measure and adjust the flight stability of the glider.

Documentation about this fantastic project was provided to us by CSEM in Switzerland. Thank you!

The team around iHSMD created a video that documents the development process and the experiments:

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