Honeywell has announced that its navigation technology, previously established as a key component within defense applications, is now available to a wide range of new industries that can benefit from the precision and performance of Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs).
Honeywell’s newest offering, the HG4930 IMU, applies the principles of reliability, dependability and performance from aerospace and defense, and tailors it for “straight out of the factory” integration and use in various nondefense and nonaerospace industrial applications. These applications include autonomous vehicles, surveying and mapping, ground and underwater robotics, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), and gimbal stabilization.
IMUs are extremely valuable tools that help people, vehicles and machines measure motion and calculate changes in position, anywhere in the world, even where global positioning system (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. 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,” said Chris Lund, senior director, Industrial IMUs, Honeywell Aerospace. “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 ideal for spearheading new uses or bolstering current navigation capabilities, it is also ITAR-free, meaning a broader availability for users around the world.
The HG4930 is Honeywell’s highest-performing microelectromechanical system (MEMS)-based IMU of its size and price, and has been tailored to provide significantly improved gyroscope and accelerometer performance for the environments and use cases experienced by nonaerospace and nondefense users. For industries that currently 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.
Watch a video about the new HG4930 IMU below:
