Inertial technology has been used in a wide range of applications such as\nguidance, navigation, and motion tracking. However, there are few undergraduate courses\nthat focus on the inertial technology. Traditional inertial navigation systems (INS) and\nrelevant testing facilities are expensive and complicated in operation, which makes it\ninconvenient and risky to perform teaching experiments with such systems. To solve this\nissue, this paper proposes the idea of using smartphones, which are ubiquitous and\ncommonly contain off-the-shelf inertial sensors, as the experimental devices. A series of\ncurriculum experiments are designed, including the Allan variance test, the calibration test,\nthe initial leveling test and the drift feature test. These experiments are well-selected and\ncan be implemented simply with the smartphones and without any other specialized tools.\nThe curriculum syllabus was designed and tentatively carried out on 14 undergraduate\nstudents with a science and engineering background. Feedback from the students show that\nthe curriculum can help them gain a comprehensive understanding of the inertial\ntechnology such as calibration and modeling of the sensor errors, determination of the\ndevice attitude and accumulation of the sensor errors in the navigation algorithm. The use of\ninertial sensors in smartphones provides the students the first-hand experiences and intuitive feelings about the function of inertial sensors. Moreover, it can motivate students to utilize\nubiquitous low-cost sensors in their future research.
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