Honeywell offers new IMU for easy integration

Long established as a key component within defense applications, navigation technology from Honeywell is now available to a wide range of new industries that can benefit from the advanced precision and performance of reliable, rugged and easy-to-install inertial measurement units (IMUs).

Honeywell’s newest IMU offering — the HG4930 — applies the principles of reliability, dependability and performance from aerospace and defense. It’s tailored for “straight out of the factory” integration and use in various non-defense and non-aerospace industrial applications, the company said.

Applications include autonomous vehicles, surveying and mapping, ground and underwater robotics, unmanned aerial vehicles and gimbal stabilization.

IMUs help people, vehicles and machines measure motion and calculate changes in position, anywhere in the world, even where GPS signals are intermittent. In industries where automation is taking hold and working conditions where GPS may be out of touch, an IMU can help fill in the moments of disconnect and keep things like an autonomous underwater vehicle or a robot in a factory informed about how they are moving relative to their surroundings.

“For more than a decade, we’ve designed our IMUs to perform in the extremely harsh and demanding environments for our aerospace and defense customers,” said Chris Lund, senior director, industrial IMUs, Honeywell Aerospace. “But there is no shortage of possibilities for how that same IMU technology can support a wealth of markets hungry for the next level of enhanced navigation and control. The HG4930 tactical grade IMU is a highly competitive and cost-efficient variant of our industry-leading navigation technology. Whether helping your industry evolve toward autonomy or augmenting a platform or solution’s precision in domains where GPS is unreliable, the HG4930 delivers the needed performance.”

In addition to the HG4930 IMU being an extremely small, lightweight and low-power product for spearheading new uses or bolstering current navigation capabilities, Honeywell’s HG4930 IMU is not classified under an International Traffic in Arms Regulation category, but instead is free from the burden of an export license for all but a few military-related use cases. This means a broader availability for customers around the world.

With more than 500,000 tactical-grade IMUs produced to date, the HG4930 builds on a proven Honeywell legacy of reliable inertial technologies. According to Honeywell, it is the highest-performing microelectromechanical system (MEMS)-based IMU of its size and price, and benefits from world-class inertial sensor development, calibration and compensation.

The HG4930 has been tailored to provide significantly improved gyroscope and accelerometer performance for the environments and use cases experienced by non-aerospace and non-defense users.

For industries that depend on less reliable MEMS or large, power hungry and expensive fiber-optic gyroscopes for navigation and control capabilities, the HG4930 offers three off-the-shelf performance grades for easy replacement and new capability.