In recent years, microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) technology has developed rapidly, and low precision inertial devices have achieved small volume, light weight, and mass production. Under this background, array technology has emerged to achieve high precision inertial measurement under the premise of low cost. This paper reviews the development of MEMS inertial measurement unit (IMU) array technology. First, the different types of common inertial measurement unit arrays are introduced and the basic principles are explained. Secondly, IMU array's development status is summarized by analyzing the research results over the years. Then, the key technologies and corresponding development status of IMU array are described, respectively, including error analysis modeling and calibration, data fusion technology, fault detection, and isolation technology. Finally, the characteristics and shortcomings of the past research results are summarized, the future research direction is discussed, and some thoughts are put forward to further improve the accuracy of the IMU array.
Keywords: data fusion; inertial measurement unit array; microelectromechanical systems.