I am working on some project where I required to make an app which can tell course of an iphone but without GPS. I can use GPS to get initial fix.
Now I can get true heading using compass but that is the orientation of phone w.r.t north pole not the direction in which phone is moving?
How can I get course using compass.
I have looked at accelerometer also but in most of the stack quesions it is advised not to use acclerometer for distance and speed calculation.
Any help appreciated!!
The 'course' you are referring to is actually the ground speed vector measured by the GPS (measured by combining two or more consecutive GPS readings and calculating the speed using the timestamps : v = dx/dt).
The compass has nothing to do with course. You can hold your iPhone however you want and walk at a certain direction. Your compass is sensitive to your phone orientation, not movement.
The accelerometer, as its name implies, measures acceleration. It would be difficult to deduce your course solely from that information because of noise.
So your solution is found in CLLocation class : properties speed and course
https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/CoreLocation/Reference/CLLocation_Class/index.html#//apple_ref/occ/instp/CLLocation/speed
Related
I have an arduino controlling an led light strip, and an iphone connected to the arduino via bluetooth. so the number of lights that are turned on correspond to the phones position along an x axis
Is it possible to use the accelerometer to estimate the distance the phone has traveled. i'm currently polling the accelerometer at 0.01 second intervals. so in 0.5 seconds i'll have an array of 50 values. I believe each value represents the g force at the instance it was measured, so 1.0 = 9.8 meters/second. What would be the formula to take this array and the time interval to calculate the distance? Am i reinventing the wheel here? i feel like arKit has to use some kind of position tracking similar to this. Is there anything in coreMotion that could accomplish this for me.
Obligatory apology for not knowing what i'm doing. also similar questions have been asked before but they are >2 years old and the answer then was its possible but not accurate. i assume it could be more accurate now because arkit wouldn't work without doing something like
No, this isn't practical. The problem is drift. You can't tell if the phone is still or moving at a constant velocity, and the accelerometer isn't accurate enough to "zero out" the velocity of the phone. Minor errors in your calculations almost immediately swamp your results and you can't tell if the phone is sitting still or moving at a constant speed.
Acceleration is the second derivative of position. To start with acceleration you have to integrate twice, which will magnify errors.
To do this you could have two bluetooth sensors (one at each end of the bar) and use triangulation to calculate position. I haven't done this calculation myself to know all the details of it, but it's the same idea as those bluetooth tags you can have on a bunch of items to help you locate your keys, etc.
I'm new to Core Motion and I'm very confused. Can somebody please explain what these inputs measure and how they can be useful in simple terms?
Accelerometers measure movement relative to gravity, by virtue of "feeling" the force of movement applied to the device. Force of movement can be described as the rate of acceleration and deceleration of the device, hence the name of this sensor.
Gyroscopes measure changes in rotation by virtue of a suspended element reporting its rotation relative to the device. As the device rotates, this suspended element doesn't rotate, so there's a report coming from it that tells you how far the phone's rotated.
Magnetometers get their idea of rotational position from the north/south magnetic fields that compasses use to know where they are relative to the poles. This data is used (primarily) to help the Gyroscope, because these things suffer from float and inertia.
Combined, the information from these sensors, when filtered well (which Apple does for you with CoreMotion) give you all the movement of a phone.
So you can know if the user is swinging the phone around like a table tennis bat, or steering like a Wii Remote Mario style game controller, or simply walking.
I'm currently developing an iPhone App (on iPhone 5, iOS 7, Xcode 5) which requires a very accurate determination of the current attitude. The "attitude" of CMDeviceMotion does not fulfil these requirements because Apple's sensor fusion algorithm seems to rely too much on the gyroscope which drifts away rather fast (in my experience). That's why I decided to read out the bare sensor data and later I want to combine it within a sensor fusion algorithm by myself.
When asking for magnetometer data one has two possibilities:
via CMMagnetometerData in CMMotionManager
via CMCalibratedMagneticField in CMDeviceMotion about which Apple says
The CMCalibratedMagneticField returned by this property gives you the total magnetic field in the device’s vicinity without device bias. Unlike the magneticField property of the CMMagnetometer class, these values reflect the earth’s magnetic field plus surrounding fields, minus device bias.
In principle (2.) is exactly what I want.
There is a very simple test if magnetometer data is calibrated properly. For simplicity one can restrict oneself to two dimensions. When the device lies on it's back, the combination B_x^2 + B_y^2 must be constant, independent of the direction the device is pointing to. It must just equal the horizontal component of the Earth's magnetic field (assuming no other fields in the vicinity of the device). Thus, when performing a 360 degrees turn of the device which lies on it's back, the measured data B_y over B_x should display a circle. See here for details.
Now the point: the data of CMCalibratedMagneticField does NOT result in a circle!
Does anyone have an explanation for that? Or does anyone know, how the CMCalibratedMagneticField comes about? Is the magnetometer calibrated in the sense of the link from above when performing the "eight-shaped" movement of the device or what is the movement good for?
Btw. why the "eight-shaped" movement and not flipping the device around it's three axis, which would allow a calibration as described in the link from above?
I would be very glad for any clarification with this issue... Thanks!
There is a problem with the magnetometer in iOS 7, it has an error of +-7º. Try using the 7.1 beta version.
EDIT
The magnetometer has zero-drift over time, but is pretty inaccurate for sudden changes in position. The accelerometer and gyroscope on the other hand adjust quickly for sudden changes but, being inertial sensors, they lose accuracy over a period of time.
So when CMCalibratedMagneticField tries compensate for your rotational motion it uses data from the gyroscope and accelerometer. This is when the accelerometer and gyroscope's +-7º error creeps in and throws your circle off track. Check this answer and this wikipedia article for more info.
As regards to the figure of eight:
Both do the same thing, they orient the "North" of your device in each direction in hope of cancelling out magnetic interference. Flipping your device along all three axes will work better but it is harder to perform and not as easily understood by the user.
Hope this helps.
I'm looking to create a function for my app which records the distance travelled in the vertical plane. More specifically, I want to record how far the device has been 'dropped' - this could mean dropped at arm's length onto the floor or dropped slowly with the user as they go down ten floors in an elevator. I'm looking for advice on the best way to calculate this with a relatively high level of accuracy.
I've read a little on the difficulty in accurately measuring distance travelled using core motion - especially as I need it to work even if the device rotates during the movement. From what I've researched it seems as though it would be impossible, or at least very difficult, to achieve this using core motion.
Would I be able to achieve this effect with Core Location instead? I've seen posts about calculating lateral distance, as in during a car journey, but nothing about vertical distance.
Is it as simple as 'startingAltitude - endingAltitude = distanceTravelled?
If so - how accurate is the altitude measurement of Core Location and how could I get started with this behaviour? I'm fairly new to iOS programming and would appreciate any pointers on the most appropriate method of achieving the function I want.
Thanks
There are serious limitations to both approaches.
Using an accelerometer to measure distance travelled requires very precise and accurate real-time measurement of acceleration. Any error in acceleration reading leads to error in your velocity calculation, which makes your location reading drift from the real location. Drift gets worse over time, to the point where the error swamps the actual location reading.
Based on my testing the altitude reading in iOS GPS devices is really bad. +/- 100 or more meters is not uncommon. Indoors GPS readings tend to get really bad, and the altitude reading is bad enough to start.
Iphone accelerometer provides user acceleration and gravity reading? It's clear from the apple guide the user acceleration means, the acceleration than the phone get's from the user. Then what is the meaning of gravity reading? Anyway they have mention total acceleration is the addition of both! I m confused with gravity reading, Can anyone explain me the theory behind this?
Thank you in advance!
The accelerometer measures the sum (user acceleration + gravity). Unfortunately it is of little use, in your application you typically need one or the other. So it is split into components (into user acceleration and gravity) with a sophisticated procedure called sensor fusion.
Gravity points downwards, corresponds to the gravitation. It tells you where downwards is. You can compute tilt angles from it, which may be handy in developing tilt games.
The user acceleration is handy when you are trying to figure out how the phone is shaken. It good for shaking games.
See also accelerometers uses- smartphone
Gravity is an acceleration which is constant an downward. It is indistingishable along its vector from any other constant acceleration. Rotating the phone is going to change the contribution of gravity to each of the acceleration axis proportionate to angle with the ground. Gravity being constant, any change in combined vector length of the three axis should be due to user acceleration.