Inertial measurement units (IMUs) are pretty important for legged robots, as it provides a sense of orientation. However, to get quality readings, these sensors do not come cheap. I’ve used LORD MicroStrain and VECTORNAV products in some of our bigger robots, but these are not exactly economical choices when you want a robot that is supposed to be on the more affordable side. Then there’s the interesting product out of nowhere from none other than ST: ISM330DHCX.

So I had to grab one and see how it performs. To keep things simple on my end, I got Adafruit’s version, but I don’t imagine the actual sensor behaving differently because it is from them. I hooked it up to a Raspberry Pi via I2C and here are the results.

With Covid, it is difficult at the moment to get my hands on the MicroStrain and VECTORNAV that we have in the lab, but I’ll update this post later on with those two and see how this guy performs against them.