A Compensation Method in Magnetic Distortion Through Regularized Inverse Problems

Abstract

In magnetic surveys, three-axis magnetometers (TAMs) are usually installed on large carriers, and the TAM outputs are inevitably subjected to errors from TAMs and the carrier (including scale factor, nonorthogonality, bias error, temperature error, soft iron error, and hard iron error). Traditional compensation methods may result in unreliable and unsuccessful solutions when maneuvers of the vehicle are constrained. Therefore, a compensation method based on regularized inverse problems is proposed. We inspect the performance of the proposed method by conducting simulated and semiphysical experiments. All the results indicate that the proposed calibration method can still achieve high performance in the case of narrow-range attitudes and obtain more accurate magnetic components.