Simple non-iterative calibration for triaxial accelerometers

Abstract

For high precision measurements, accelerometers need recalibration between different measurement occasions. In this paper we derive a simple calibration method for triaxial accelerometers with orthogonal axes. Just like previously proposed iterative methods, we compute the calibration parameters (biases and gains) from measurements of the Earth gravity for six different unknown orientations of the accelerometer. However, our method is non-iterative, so there are no complicated convergence issues depending on input parameters, round-off errors etc.The main advantages of our method are that only from the accelerometer output voltages it gives a complete knowledge of whether it is possible, with any method, to recover the accelerometer biases and gains from the output voltages, and when this is possible, we have a simple explicit formula for computing them with a smaller number of arithmetic operations than previous iterative approaches. Moreover, we show that such successful recovery is guaranteed if the six calibration measurements deviate with angles smaller than some upper bound from a natural setup with two horizontal axes. We provide an estimate from below of this upper bound that, for instance, allows 5 degree deviations in arbitrary directions for the Colibrys SF3000L accelerometers in our lab.