3.1. Hardware sub-system for the data collection
The primary data regarding the full-body movements are collected
using a commercial inertial motion capture system, developed
by Animazoo (UK), called IGS-180i which includes also a
magnetic compensation to capture in locations previously out-ofbounds
for inertial systems, such as factories, warehouses, assembly
and production lines.
The system is composed by 17 IMUs, placed on a light full-body
suit (total weight is 1.5 kg), working on an inertial update rate of
500 Hz with a maximum angular rate of 1200/s and 6 degrees of
freedom for each sensor (Fig. 2). The dimensions of IMUs are
5.07 cm 1.45 cm 0.92 cm, with a weigh of about 11 g for each
sensor. They are linked to a light and small portable multi-processing
unit (MPU) which, thanks to aWIFI connection up to more than
50 m, sends the data to the personal computer for the real-time
processing. The magnetic interferences are solved with an
advanced compensation developed for each IMU, reaching very
accurate resolution degrees.
Finally, it is very flexible, due to its adaptability to very different
operators and application environments, from laboratory to warehousing
or production-assembly systems and it is very quick to
use, with very low setup time, up to 10 min.
The available motion data are easy to be processed and they
regard both all the body joint angles and body segments orientations
and positions, thanks to the pipeline procedure for defining
the correct human skeleton.