Hardware Sensor Fusion Solutions

One of the great innovations in motion control in the last few years is the embedding of a processor along with 6 and 9 DoF motion sensors in a single package to provide sensor fusion solutions where the resulting quaternions are read directly by a microcontroller via I2C or SPI. I call this hardware sensor fusion but in reality the algorithms are executed in software on the embedded processor rather than on the host microcontroller. The advantages are many: the sensor fusion code doesn't take up limited flash memory on the host, the sensor fusion is off-loaded from the host to the embedded processor, which is optimized for sensor fusion, and highly efficient and sophisticated filtering and autocalibration of the sensors can be accomplished automagically without the user having to become an expert in sensor fusion theory. I want to take a quick look at three of these hardware sensor fusion solutions here: the BNO055 from Bosch, the MAX21100 from Maxim Integrated, and the EM7180 from EM Microelectronics.