Automatic calibration for inertial measurement unit

The nine degrees-of-freedom (DOF) inertial measurement units (IMU) are generally composed of three kinds of sensor: accelerometer, gyroscope and magnetometer. The calibration of these sensor suites not only requires turn-table or purpose-built fixture, but also entails a complex and laborious procedure in data sampling. In this paper, we propose a method to calibrate a 9-DOF IMU by using a set of casually sampled raw sensor measurement. Our sampling procedure allows the sensor suite to move by hand and only requires about six minutes of fast and slow arbitrary rotations with intermittent pauses. It requires neither the specially-designed fixture and equipment, nor the strict sequences of sampling steps. At the core of our method are the techniques of data filtering and a hierarchical scheme for calibration. All the raw sensor measurements are preprocessed by a series of band-pass filters before use. And our calibration scheme makes use of the gravity and the ambient magnetic field as references, and hierarchically calibrates the sensor model parameters towards the minimization of the mis-alignment, scaling and bias errors. Moreover, the calibration steps are formulated as a series of function optimization problems and are solved by an evolutionary algorithm. Finally, the performance of our method is experimentally evaluated. The results show that our method can effectively calibrate the sensor model parameters from one set of raw sensor measurement, and yield consistent calibration results.