A new multi-position calibration method for MEMS inertial navigation systems

Abstract

The Global Positioning System (GPS) is a worldwide navigation system that requires a clear line of sight to the orbiting satellites. For land vehicle navigation, a clear line of sight cannot be maintained all the time as the vehicle can travel through tunnels, under bridges, forest canopies or within urban canyons. In such situations, the augmentation of GPS with other systems is necessary for continuous navigation. Inertial sensors can determine the motion of a body with respect to an inertial frame of reference. Traditionally, inertial systems are bulky, expensive and controlled by government regulations. Micro-electro mechanical systems (MEMS) inertial sensors are compact, small, inexpensive and most importantly, not controlled by governmental agencies due to their large error characteristics. Consequently, these sensors are the perfect candidate for integrated civilian navigation applications with GPS. However, these sensors need to be calibrated to remove the major part of the deterministic sensor errors before they can be used to accurately and reliably bridge GPS signal gaps. A new multi-position calibration method was designed for MEMS of high to medium quality. The method does not require special aligned mounting and has been adapted to compensate for the primary sensor errors, including the important scale factor and non-orthogonality errors of the gyroscopes. A turntable was used to provide a strong rotation rate signal as reference for the estimation of these errors. Two different quality MEMS IMUs were tested in the study. The calibration results were first compared directly to those from traditional calibration methods, e.g. six-position and rate test. Then the calibrated parameters were applied in three datasets of GPS/INS field tests to evaluate their accuracy indirectly by comparing the position drifts during short-term GPS signal outages.