Evaluation of high performance and compensation method for low cost micro electro-mechanical system based inertial measurement unit

Given the burgeoning demand for a small, lightweight, low cost and high performance inertial Measurement Units(IMU), high fidelity test, compensation methods are necessary to evaluate and provide the corrections to the performance of Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems(MEMS) sensors and standalone IMU. An effective calibration method combining with Kalman filter is implemented to evaluate the significant error sources of IMU. The deterministic and stochastic errors are estimated in virtue of static tests, rate tests, and thermal tests. Corresponding description of the integrated GPS/MEMS-IMU system, which fuse the fusion the information from an inexpensive IMU and a GPS receiver, is presented along with navigation experimental results compared with navigation grade IMU reference. Real data test is performed to validate and evaluate the proposed approach.