Comparison of the performances of six magneto-inertial sensor fusion filters for orientation estimation in movement analysis

Magneto-Inertial technology is a promising alternative to optical stereophotogrammetry as it allows to measure the movement of subjects in real world conditions. Despite several sensor fusion filters for estimating the orientation have been published in the literature, there is still a lack of consensus about their accuracy. This work aims at evaluating the performance of six filters at three different rotation rates using an optoelectronic reference. To enable a “fair” comparison a tuning procedure for setting the proper parameter values for each algorithm was proposed. The procedure was designed to work without relying on any orientation reference. After tuning, all the filters performed reasonably (rms error < 6.5 deg). At slow, medium, and high rotation rates the lowest errors exhibited by the algorithms amounted to 2.5 deg, 2.7 deg, and 4.1 deg, respectively.