A flexible motion tracking system based on inertial sensors

School of Mechanical Engineering and Automation, Beihang University, 100191 Beijing, China

Abstract

As a newly emerging human-computer interaction, motion tracking technology offers a way to extract human motion data. This paper presents a series of techniques to improve the flexibility of the motion tracking system based on the inertial measurement units (IMUs). First, we built a most miniatured wireless tracking node by integrating an IMU, a Wi-Fi module and a power supply. Then, the data transfer rate was optimized using an asynchronous query method. Finally, to simplify the setup and make the interchangeability of all nodes possible, we designed a calibration procedure and trained a support vector machine (SVM) model to determine the binding relation between the body segments and the tracking nodes after setup. The evaluations of the whole system justify the effectiveness of proposed methods and demonstrate its advantages compared to other commercial motion tracking system.