This post will examine the steps currently being used to go from vertical acceleration data to vertical displacement and the issues involved.
Step 1: Getting acceleration data
The first step is to setup the rotating arm with the IMU attached, rotate it for a fixed amount of time, say 60 seconds and capture the raw linear acceleration data for the z-axis which is the vertical axis. See below video for an example of the rotating arm.
Note that this video is just an example of the arm rotating. All of the data used in this post was obtained with the arm set to a 40cm diameter and a rotation speed of approximately 0.2Hz. The recorded z-axis acceleration data looks something like this:
Step 2 : Filtering acceleration signal
As it is, this signal is too noisy to work with and so it is first filtered before any other signal processing steps occur. The low-pass filtered signal is shown in orange below:
Step 3 : Peak detection
Now that we have a relatively smooth signal to work with, peak detection is relatively simple. The orange x marks on the graph below mark the peaks and troughs of the signal.
Step 4: Break signal into chunks and double integrate each chunk
These peak detection points are used to break the signal into chunks where each chunk is separately integrated twice to go from acceleration chunks to displacement chunks. The displacement chunks can then be graphed which looks like this:
One issue is that changing the integral reset point has a drastic impact on the end displacement result. The above image was obtained by detecting the minima and maxima in the acceleration signal and breaking it into chunks at those points. If you break the signal at just the minima you get the following displacement graph:
By using the maxima to reset the integration you get this graph:
Remember that the actual arm diameter was 40cm so we should see a maximum displacement of 40cm. Take the above image for example. The first blue line on the left goes from approximately 0.2m down to -0.5m which is a total displacement of 0.7 meters. The rightmost blue line goes from 0.2 down to -0.2 which is exactly what the expected result would be. More testing is necessary to try and narrow down the cause of this issue.
