Usage of multiple external IMUs (for wing bending detection)

Hello everyone,

For a research project on active gust load reduction, we want to build an unmanned airplane with elastic wings and a wingspan of 3 meter.
We want to install multiple IMUs in the wings in order to quickly detect any unwanted additional deflection of the wings and alleviate it by rapidly deflecting the flaps.
I would like to implement the control algorithms in a separate flight mode in ArduPlane and, for example, use a Mateksys H743 as board. I’ve already done something like that and I’m confident that I can manage it.
However, I’m not very familiar with microcontrollers and electronics.

Can anyone tell me the maximum number of external IMUs that can be used in ArduPilot?
A colleague of mine has already used an external IMU by making an adjustment in the hwdef. However, he had expressed concerns that the CPU could be overloaded with several external IMUs (depending on the sample rate). I would probably also like to low pass filter the data from the IMUs.
Also, does anyone have any ideas on how to connect the IMUs over distances of up to 1.5 meter? Is there any way to do this with I2C?
Can anyone say whether this is a good concept or whether we should use, for example, a companion for this?

I would be very happy if someone could help me with this. Many thanks in advance.

Ardupilot does not support flexibly mounted IMUs.

You can use external I2C, Serial or CAN IMU but you will need a separate driver to handle them.

I2C may suffer from interference at those distances.
If you use I2C you will be limited by addresses of the sensors if it has 2 possible addresses you can at most use 2 sensors.

You can possibly implement active wing unloading in lua.