Field calibration of inertial measurement units for miniature unmanned aircraft
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abstract
Modern avionics equipment typically includes measurements from magnetometers, accelerometers, and gyroscopes, which can be combined in attitude filters and state observers to provide information on the vehicle configuration, velocity, and acceleration. While vital for state estimation and feedback control, sensors used on miniature aircraft, constrained by payload capacity, are based on microelectromechanical systems and are of lower quality than full scale counterparts. This work presents a low cost, batch procedure for calibrating inertial sensors on miniature aircraft immediately before takeoff, so that accurate measurements are available for real-time applications. The routine requires a single maneuver to excite the sensors, and can be implemented in full form on a ground station computer, or as a lower fidelity version in onboard microprocessor software. An experiment is presented to validate the accuracy of the calibration procedure. Copyright 2009 by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc.