MEMS gyros temperature calibration through artificial neural networks

Abstract In this paper, the application of Artificial Neural Networks to perform the thermal calibration of bias for Micro Electro-Mechanical gyros that are installed in Inertial Measurement Units is discussed. In recent years, the interest in using these systems to perform integrated inertial navigation has increased. Several new applications, related to the use of autonomous systems and personal navigation systems in GPS-challenging environments, have been developed. Thermal calibration of bias is a key issue to be assessed to achieve the best performance of a Micro Electro-Mechanical gyro. It can reduce sensor bias to one order of magnitude lower than non-calibrated conditions. Usually, thermal calibration is performed by exploiting polynomial fitting, i.e. finding the least-square polynomial that fits experimental data collected during laboratory tests in a climatic chamber. Polynomials have some drawbacks when they are applied to Micro Electro-Mechanical gyro calibration. They are not adequate to model abrupt change of bias trend in small temperature intervals and sensor hysteresis. For this reason, in the present paper, the use of Back Propagation Artificial Neural Networks is suggested as an improvement of polynomial fitting. Indeed, Neural Networks have intrinsic adaptive configurations and standard training and testing techniques, so that they can be adequately adopted for mapping thermal bias variations. In this paper, the polynomial fitting and Neural Network compensation algorithms are compared on selected testing points where the two techniques have the largest difference. Results highlight that the proposed method has better performance on these points. Therefore, the time in which the flight attitude accuracy meets the requirements imposed by the current regulations is improved by 20%.