A Novel Algorithm for Optimal Placement of Multiple Inertial Sensors to Improve the Sensing Accuracy

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel algorithm to determine the optimal placement of redundant inertial sensors such as accelerometers and gyroscopes (gyros) for increasing the sensing accuracy. In this paper, we have proposed a novel iterative algorithm to find the optimal sensor configuration. The proposed algorithm utilizes the majorization-minimization (MM) algorithm and the duality principle to find the optimal configuration. Unlike the state-of-the-art which are mainly geometrical in nature and restricted to certain noise statistics, the proposed algorithm gives the exact positions of the sensors, and moreover, the proposed algorithm is independent of the nature of the noise at different sensors. The proposed alogrithm has been implemented and tested via numerical simulation in the MATLAB. The simulation results show that the algorithm converges to the optimal configurations and show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.