The Design of Distributed Calibration Algorithm and Its Application to MEMS Inertial Sensors

Micro-Electro-Mechanical System (MEMS) can be mass-produced, which integrates the micro sensor, micro actuator and control circuit, interfaces, and communication. MEMS inertial devices have the characteristics of small, lightweight, low cost, and homogeneity. How to improve the accuracy or reduce the cost is the engineering requirement. Considering the homogeneity of the MEMS sensors, the batch calibration method is one of the feasible ways to reduce cost. This paper proposes the distributed calibration method which is different from the traditional system-level and discrete calibration. The distributed calibration method requires only one or a few rotations of the combined and arranged devices to excite the individual error parameters of the inertial instruments. The relationship between the error parameters and the navigation error is rewritten via equivalence transformation. The 24 error parameters of the sensor are identified by the distributed least-squares estimation method using the velocity error as the observed quantity. Through simulation experiments, the method can calibrate more MEMS devices simultaneously than the traditional calibration method with the same accuracy requirement.