Evolutionary algorithm based 9DOF sensor board calibration

Abstract

Accelerometers gyroscopes and magnetometers can be used in a large variety of applications, and their calibration is a very actual problem due to high error rates, especially when errors are integrated in time. Systematic errors from the measurement values can be removed by sensor calibration, thus the applicability of the sensor can be increased. In this paper, a new evolutionary algorithm-based, quick and easy-to-use calibration method is presented. The algorithm has been developed and tested with real measurement data of the above-mentioned sensors. During this work, measurement data have been collected with 9 degree of freedom (9DOF) sensor boards, which are built up of three-axis accelerometer, gyroscope and magnetometer. For accelerometer and magnetometer calibration, bias values, scale factors and non-orthogonality corrections have been calculated, while for the gyroscopes only offsets have been determined.