The calibration method for accelerometers in the redundant MEMS inertial navigation system

Compared with the non-redundant inertial navigation system (INS), the redundant INS (RINS) has more error parameters and the system is more complicated. The calibration methods for non-redundant INS are unable to be adopted by RINS directly. Meanwhile, the inner lever arm effect of accelerometers is more severe in RINS, which is not supposed to be ignored in the error compensation. To solve the problems above, this paper proposes a novel calibration method for accelerometers in RINS. First, the paper analyses and models the bias, scale factor error, installation angle error and lever arm error. Based on the error model, two Kalman filters are designed to estimate the error parameters. The calibration is divided into two steps: the bias, scale factor error and installation angle error are calibrated by the static multi-position experiment first, and then the lever arm error is calibrated by the rotation experiment. Experiments prove that the proposed method can effectively calibrate the deterministic error of the accelerometers, that the estimation errors are controlled at 1 × 10−4 level. Further, the paper studies and optimizes the turntable rotation scheme in the lever arm error calibration experiment, and proposes the design principles for the rotation scheme. Comparing with the casually designed scheme, the optimized procedure can improve the accuracy by almost an order of magnitude as well as the time-consumption being shortened by 40%. The design principles are applicable to the other inertial navigation systems to improve the calibration accuracy and reduces the time cost.