Author: Cole Tucker

This year at Robosub, the team experienced a set of major failures with their Inertial Measurement Unit or IMU. The team encountered an issue where the driver could cause the device to enter a corrupt state and need sometimes minutes of work to recover. The team also suffered from positioning errors due to the IMU’s magnetometer experiencing major drift despite being calibrated for the hard and soft iron of the pools being used for competition. These issues combined were largely responsible for our poor performance in our third chance run.

VectorNav VN 100T IMU

In August 2022, the team contacted VectorNav, seeking a new IMU. VectorNav graciously agreed to sponsor the team and send over a ruggedized VN100T IMU for the team to integrate into tempest this season. The team has already integrated it into our vehicle and have found it to be very reliable on startup as well as rejecting magnetic disturbances in the pool. Additionally, the team is planning to make contributions to its open source ROS2 driver to enhance its usability.

VectorNav IMU in Tempest.