MEMS technology quality requirements as applied to multibeam echosounder

Small, lightweight, power-efficient and low-cost microelectromechanical system (MEMS) inertial sensors and microcontrollers available in the market today help reduce the instability of Multibeam Sonars. Current MEMS inertial measurement units (IMUs) come in many shapes, sizes, and costs — depending on the application and performance required. Although MEMS inertial sensors offer affordable and appropriately scaled units, they are not currently capable of meeting all requirements for accurate and precise attitudes, due to their inherent measurement noise. The article presents the comparison of different MEMS technologies and their parameters regarding to the main application, namely Multibeam Echo Sounders (MBES). The quality of MEMS parameters is crucial for further MBES record-processing. The article presents the results of undertaken researches in that area, and these results are relatively positive for low-cost MEMS. The paper undertakes some vital aspect of using MEMS in the attitude and heading reference system (AHRS) context. The article presents a few aspects of MEMS gyro errors and their estimation process in the context of INS processing flow, as well as points out the main difficulties behind the INS when using a few top MEMS technologies.