Design and Implementation of ZYNQ-Based Data Synchronous Acquisition System

Time synchronization is a key technology in multi-source navigation systems, which is crucial in robot navigation, autonomous driving, SLAM and other fields. In generally, a multi-source navigation system contains multiple sensors such as IMU, GNSS, UWB, Camera, Lidar, Barometer, etc., in which the time reference of each sensor is not unified, the sampling frequency is not consistent, and the Camera exposure is not synchronized, etc., which will seriously affect the accuracy of the multi-source navigation algorithm. In this paper, a novel multi-source data acquisition system based on ZYNQ is proposed, which applies the GNSS system as a unified clock source, and the pulse per second signal to complete the synchronization of the counters in ZYNQ as the timestamps of the acquired sensors. The IMU signal is also used as the exposure trigger for the 2 RGB Cameras to achieve the synchronization between the IMU and the Camera. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed system enables precise and synchronized sensor acquisition.