Precision inertial solutions for autonomous logistics vehicles

An automated guided vehicle, or AGV, is a type of mobile robot used in industrial applications to transport materials and products within a facility without human intervention.

AGVs are guided by various technologies such as magnetic strips, lasers, inertial sensors, or cameras that allow them to navigate predetermined paths and avoid obstacles.They are commonly used in industries like manufacturing, warehousing, and logistics to automate tasks like moving pallets, raw materials, or finished goods.

AGVs improve efficiency, reduce labor costs, and enhance safety by performing repetitive tasks autonomously. They play a key role in modern automated industrial systems.

An inertial navigation system (INS) is a self-contained navigation solution that determines the position, velocity, and orientation of a moving platform by continuously measuring its motion using inertial sensors. At its core, an INS relies on a triad of accelerometers to sense linear accelerations along three perpendicular axes and a triad of gyroscopes to measure angular rates around those same axes. By integrating these measurements over time, the system computes how the platform’s speed, attitude, and location evolve from a known starting point.

Because an INS does not depend on external signals such as GPS, radio beacons, or visual references, it can operate reliably in environments where external navigation aids are unavailable, denied, or degraded—such as underwater, indoors, underground, or in military GNSS-jamming scenarios.

Modern INS typically incorporate sophisticated filtering algorithms, most commonly a Kalman filter, to fuse raw sensor data, mitigate drift, and estimate the most accurate navigation state. In many applications, the INS is coupled with GNSS, odometers, Doppler velocity logs, or magnetometers to constrain long-term drift and deliver highly stable navigation. The result is a robust, high-update-rate navigation solution essential for aircraft, UAVs, missiles, autonomous vehicles, ships, AUVs, and a wide range of industrial systems that require precise, continuous awareness of motion and orientation.

An Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) is a compact sensor module that measures the motion and orientation of a platform by capturing its linear accelerations and angular rotation rates. At its core, an IMU integrates three accelerometers and three gyroscopes arranged along orthogonal axes to provide six degrees of measurement.

Accelerometers sense how the platform accelerates in space, while gyroscopes track how it rotates. By processing these measurements together, an IMU delivers precise information about changes in velocity, attitude, and heading without relying on any external signals. This makes IMUs essential for navigation in environments where GPS is unavailable, unreliable, or intentionally denied. Their performance depends heavily on sensor quality, calibration, and how well errors—such as biases, noise, scale factors, and misalignments—are controlled.

High-grade IMUs include advanced calibration, thermal compensation, vibration filtering, and bias stability mechanisms to ensure that errors do not accumulate rapidly over time. Because of these characteristics, IMUs are used across a wide range of applications—from UAVs, loitering munitions, and autonomous vehicles to AUVs, robotics, and industrial stabilization systems—providing robust, continuous awareness of motion and orientation even in the harshest operational conditions.