A ROS Driver for Xsens Wireless Inertial Measurement Unit Systems

This paper presents an efficient open-source driver for interfacing Xsens inertial measurement systems (in particular the Xsens MTw Awinda wireless motion trackers) with the Robot Operating System (ROS). The driver supports the simultaneous connection of up to 20 trackers, limit fixed by the Xsens software, to a master PC, and directly streams sensors data (linear accelerations, angular velocities, magnetic fields, orientations) up to 120 Hz to the ROS network through one or multiple configurable topics. Moreover, a synchronization procedure is implemented to avoid possible partial frames where the readings from one (or multiple) trackers are missing. The proposed messages are based on ROS standard ones and comply with the ROS developer guidelines. This guarantees the compatibility of any ROS package requiring as input ROS standard messages with the proposed driver, thus effectively integrating Xsens inertial measurement systems with the ROS ecosystem. This work aims to push forward the development of a large variety of human-robot interaction applications where accurate real-time knowledge of human motion is crucial.