The design of an in-line accelerometer-based inclination sensing system

In this paper, we present a novel inclination sensing system, which is composed of an inexpensive and low power microcontroller with a 3-Axis digital accelerometer. Accelerometers have been widely used to determine the inclination or tilt angles of a system by calculating angles between gravity vector and its three axes. However, the angle calculation is so complicated that in most previous research work it is usually finished off-line on a more powerful computation resource, such as a PC/PDA or implemented with expensive memory lookup-tables. In the proposed system, we design and implement a novel algorithm on the embedded microcontroller such that the system is capable of transferring the raw data of the accelerometer from motion domain to angular domain in-line, such that the system can provide the inclination or tilt angle information alone in real-time.