Reliability analysis of fault-tolerant IMU architectures with redundant inertial sensors

A systematic reliability analysis procedure for evaluating fault-tolerant inertial measurement unit (IMU) architectures is described. The procedure is based on modeling the system architecture, the component reliabilities, and the redundancy management. The component reliabilities are based on constant failure rates and exponential failure distributions. The overall reliability of the IMU and the major contributors to IMU reliability are computed. Three state-of-the-art fault-tolerant IMU architectures are evaluated and compared using the procedure.>