Tossing your Smartphone

If you are teaching a course on vehicle dynamics, navigation, robotics, or rotations you might be interested in exploiting the fact that your students' smartphones are equipped with inertial navigation units (IMUs). Daniel Kawano and Prithvi Akella have harnessed the data from the IMU using the Matlab mobile app and used this data to determine the motion of a smart phone:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2ZJVSdVT5o

Further details on, and the files needed to reproduce, Prithvi and Daniel's work can be found here: 

http://rotations.berkeley.edu/reconstructing-the-motion-of-a-tossed-iphone/

The codes can also be used when a smartphone is strapped to a vehicle or droid to track the motion of the vehicle or droid.