Redundant MEMS IMU System

Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) are used to help determine the navigation state of spaceflight vehicles, including position, velocity, acceleration, orientation, and rotation rate. Traditionally IMUs used for spaceflight consist of a low number of larger, high-performance gyroscopes and accelerometers. Advances in smaller, chip-scale Micro Electro-Mechanical System (MEMS) IMUs have allowed the potential to use a higher quantity of lower-quality accelerometers and gyroscopes, with extensive unit calibration and advanced sensor fusion algorithms, to potentially achieve the performance needed for some spaceflight applications. This could allow future missions to reduce the size, weight, and power allocated to the IMU. This work would be designing, building, calibrating, and testing an IMU system with multiple MEMS IMUs on a single board to demonstrate the performance gained from the calibration and sensor fusion algorithms. This would include designing the extensive calibration procedure and algorithms, algorithms for sensor fusion, and designing the algorithm for fault detection and isolation.

This project is to design, build, and test a custom Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) consisting of several small chip-scale IMUs. Data from these tests would demonstrate the feasibility of the concept and compare the performance to standard IMUs.

This is a mature technology (TRL 7+) — the realistic path in is usually NASA's Technology Transfer Program: licensing an existing NASA patent, or a Space Act Agreement to use NASA facilities/expertise directly. NASA also runs a startup licensing program with no upfront fee for companies formed to commercialize a specific NASA technology.

None of these are guaranteed paths for this specific project — TechPort itself doesn't have an "apply" button. Reaching out to the contact(s) above with a specific question is usually the fastest way to find out what's actually open.