A Novel Calibration Method Using Six Positions for MEMS Triaxial Accelerometer

With the increase in the application of micro-electromechanical system (MEMS) accelerometers, their accurate calibration is increasingly essential to reduce the application error. Aiming at the high accuracy calibration requirements of scale factor, bias, and nonorthogonalities, we propose a novel calibration method to obtain highly accurate parameters, especially in the scenario without turntable. First, a 12-parameter model of accelerometer output data is used for analysis. The static data characteristics of the six specified positions of the accelerometer were then analyzed. Finally, based on these characteristics, a novel calibration method performed using an iterated parameter correction process is proposed. Repeatable simulations under different biases show that the calibration accuracy of the proposed method is not affected by the bias value to be calibrated, and that the calibration results have consistent accuracy. The estimation error of bias and relative error of scale factor are less than 0.5 mg and 0.05%, respectively, and the accuracy of the nonorthogonal elements of the calibration matrix S and K are 0.003 and 0.006, respectively. In addition, the calibration results of the laboratory MEMS accelerometer and the triaxial accelerometer in ADIS16488 demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Automated summary

The proposed novel calibration method for MEMS accelerometers in this paper achieves high accuracy and repeatability. By analyzing static data characteristics and utilizing an iterated parameter correction process, highly accurate calibration results can be obtained.