A Hybrid Calibration Method for a Three-Axis Magnetometer in Limited-Range Attitudes

The calibration of a three-axis magnetometer plays a vital role in its wide practical applications. Most previous calibration methods are based on the invariance of the magnitude of the magnetic field vector. However, this kind of method degrades seriously when the training data are collected at limited-range attitudes and are much of relevance. A new calibration model of magnetometer based on the combination of magnitudes of horizontal and vertical magnetic components is proposed. The numerical simulations demonstrate the proposed method can exactly estimate the error parameters both in the case of small and large-range rotation angle. The result of the physical experiment is consistent with simulations, showing the method in this paper has a better calibration performance than previous methods when the range of attitude angle of the magnetometer is limited.