Given the growth in Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and Autonomous Drive (AD), highly accurate motion sensing has become more important to vehicles than it’s ever been. Today’s car utilizes an array of cameras, LiDAR, radars, and inertial sensors to estimate the car’s orientation and location and enable real-time decisions for navigating without human assistance.
A central challenge, however, still exists, and that is to maintain accurate location tracking and motion estimation when experiencing loss of GNSS, operating in tunnels or harsh weather conditions, or when individual sensors suffer interference or occultation. To solve this challenge, Murata Manufacturing Co., Ltd. developed a high-accuracy 6 Degrees of Freedom (6DoF) IMU, tailored for direct mounting inside the AD or ADAS ECU.
The new IMU contains a high-accuracy three-axis accelerometer and three-axis gyroscope packaged in a small format suitable for in-vehicle operation, which allows it to precisely measure vehicular accelerations, angular velocities, and motions. Incorporating six motion axes within this IMU unit provides a self-contained source of real-time vehicular dynamics data that ADAS and autonomy ECUs can use directly.
Traditional motion sensors can be difficult to integrate with the ECU in other cars as there’s a certain level of pre-configuration required, or external processing must take place. Because it is designed for ECU incorporation, Murata’s newest IMU allows for fewer parts in vehicle electronics design, fewer design development challenges, and allows OEMs to bring enhanced driver assistance features to market faster.
This release reflects the broader shift across the automotive industry toward software-defined vehicles (SDVs), using high performance computing and central domain controller hardware instead of a proliferation of distributed ECUs. In the context of such architectures, high-fidelity inertial sensingg becomes a critical component of vehicle perception, localization, and control loops, a demand which will intensify further as automotive automation deepens.
