Statistical analysis and improvement of the repeatability and reproducibility of an evaluation method for IMUs on a smartphone

Abstract

An increasing number of mobile applications, like indoor-navigation or augmented reality, rely on highly accurate inertial sensor systems. However, there exists no standardized test for common inertial sensors, like accelerometers and gyroscopes to assess their accuracy. To easily determine the sensor system quality, a mobile sensor test application for smartphones was published recently. Although this test has several advantages, it lacks reproducibility and repeatability. As a remedy, we designed a special user interface that guides the operator through the test and helps judging the quality of the test conductance. While poorly conducted tests are neglected, only the meaningful ones are evaluated, so that our technology enables a more detailed analysis of the sensor systems. In this paper, we propose a statistical approach capable to distinguish between the four most important systematic errors we observed. Experiments with five state-of-the-art smartphones show that reproducibility and repeatability were significantly improved, enabling a fair comparison of the smartphone sensor systems.