{"id":3536,"date":"2015-09-28T19:25:06","date_gmt":"2015-09-29T02:25:06","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"-0001-11-30T07:00:00","slug":"3536","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vernier.com\/til\/3536","title":{"rendered":"Can I use an accelerometer to measure velocity or position?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>While the temporal integral of acceleration is velocity, and the second integral is position, it is very difficult in practice to use an accelerometer alone to find velocity and acceleration. <\/p>\n<p>One might want to use an accelerometer, such as the one in a <a href=\"\/product\/wireless-dynamics-sensor-system\/\">Wireless Dynamics Sensor System<\/a> (<nobr>WDSS<\/nobr>), to find the velocity of a cart. The problem is that any offset error in the acceleration will cause the velocity calculation error to rise linearly with time. A position calculation will have error rising quadratically with time. <\/p>\n<p>This means that no matter how carefully you zero a sensor, the calculation of position and velocity will eventually be unreliable. <\/p>\n<p>Inertial navigation systems, such as those used on rockets and submarines, use additional information from other sensors and landmarks to correct the inevitable error that accumulates in time. <\/p>\n<p>Simply integrating an accelerometer value will typically give poor values after several seconds. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>While the temporal integral of acceleration is velocity, and the second integral is position, it is very difficult in practice to use an accelerometer alone&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8976,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[6004,6003,6005],"class_list":["post-3536","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-inertial-guidance","tag-integral","tag-navigation"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vernier.com\/til\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3536","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vernier.com\/til\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vernier.com\/til\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vernier.com\/til\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8976"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vernier.com\/til\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3536"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.vernier.com\/til\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3536\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vernier.com\/til\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3536"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vernier.com\/til\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3536"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vernier.com\/til\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3536"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}