"Your phone knows its position in space"
Mistakes happen, but in a video about gyroscopes it's hard to forgive mistaking position and orientation. That's the kind of thing that warrants a delete and re-upload.
Mistakes happen, but in a video about gyroscopes it's hard to forgive mistaking position and orientation. That's the kind of thing that warrants a delete and re-upload.
This is not wrong at the pop sci level of the video.
Your phone undoubtedly has a gyroscope, accelerometer, and magnetometer all in a single IMU IC. Data from this IMU can be used to create a position cloud.
Add in some other sensor data to help collapse the position cloud, and your phone absolutely knows its position in space. Incidentally part of why IMU have magnetometers is that it’s basically one more sensor data to help collapse position clouds from just the orientation and acceleration data.
I think the only leap is how precise your phone would be with only gyroscopes generating orientation and acceleration data. But the video sort of hints at this when talking about the first rocket design using this data.
The video talks about accels in a few places, and how they are required for pose estimates.
It's basically what VR headsets and controllers do, sans their periodic error correction from cameras or lighthouses.
Accelerometers yes, gyroscopes no. The video covers accelerometers later but hasn't introduced them yet, and the "your phone knows its position" line has a visual of an IC labelled "MEMS gryoscope".
On this note, thank you for pointing it out.