Exploiting accelerometers to estimate displacement

Although the acceleration is physically related to the displacement of an object, i.e., to its change of position, it is demonstrated that the double integration of the acceleration does not provide accurate information about the displacement, due to the noise and measurement errors. This paper evaluates a correction technique based on the Kalman filter in order to increase the accuracy of the estimation of the displacement. Experiments were performed by acquiring the acceleration with an off-the-shelf accelerometer: the percentage error made by simply integrating the acceleration measurements may arrive to 68% in the general case of a movement in the space, but it can be dramatically reduced to 9% with the proposed approach. An even better behavior is obtained when the movement is constrained to a plane or along an axis.