Xsens Announces New OEM Inertial Measurement Unit

Xsens announced the launch of Xsens Avior, a lightweight, OEM form factor inertial measurement unit (IMU) with a compact 36.8mm x 40mm footprint which offers enhanced performance in a wide variety of industrial and commercial applications.

The Xsens Avior is ideal for products manufactured in high volume thanks to its vertical 10x2-pin socket connector for simple board mounting, and its tolerance of any mounting orientation in all three axes. The product also eases design integration by including UART, CAN, SPI and I2C interfaces on-board, and supports RS232 and RS422 via the product’s development kit or an external transceiver.

Xsens has integrated a new generation of sensing components in the Avior, as well as advanced analog filtering for higher stability and noise reduction, resulting in substantially better performance compared to the previous generation product. Heading accuracy is 1° RMS and roll and pitch accuracy is 0.2° RMS. Stability is also enhanced in the Xsens Avior: in-run bias stability in the gyroscope is 8°/hr, and accelerometer in-run bias stability is 15μg.

Weighing 35.2g, the Xsens Avior is enclosed in a robust aluminum housing and has a rating of IP51 and an operating temperature range of -40°C to 85°C. The sensor’s small size, light weight, high performance and robust construction provide outstanding value in applications such as:

• Camera/payload stabilization, including SOTM (SATCOM-on-the-Move) devices
• Marine equipment – remotely-operated vehicles (ROVs), autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), sensor buoys
• Mobile robots and autonomous mobile robots (AMRs)
• Drones and 3D mapping and surveying tools
• Humanoid robots

The new sensor is available in three versions:

• IMU providing calibrated inertial sensor data
• Vertical Reference Unit (VRU) providing accurate, calibrated values for roll and pitch, and unreferenced yaw data
• Attitude and Heading Reference System (AHRS), providing accurate, calibrated roll and pitch values, and heading data referenced to true North

The Xsens Avior is available in a ready-to-use hardware development kit, and is supplied with free software development kits supporting the C#/C++, Python, ROS 1 and ROS 2 and Matlab environments, as well as full documentation and step-by-step guides to design integration.

Key product specifications:

• Typical power consumption: <0.5W
• Maximum output data rate: 400Hz
• Gyroscope full range: ±300°/s
• Accelerometer full range: ±8 g
• Magnetometer full range: ±8 G
• Fully supported in the MT Software Suite development environment
• Certifications: CE, FCC, RoHS, ITAR free