A calibration procedure and testing of MEMS inertial sensors for an FPGA-based GPS/INS system

Given the burgeoning demand for a small, lightweight, consume very little power, low-cost high performance inertial Measurement Units(IMU), test methods are necessary to evaluate the current state of the available of Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems(MEMS) technology. A reliable and efficient calibration and testing method for evaluating the performance of MEMS IMU is developed, by virtue of MEMS sensor suffering from various errors that have to be calibrated and accomplished to get acceptable navigation results. A prototype development board based on FPGA, dual core processor´s configuration for IMU/INS/GPS integrated navigation system is designed for experimental tests. According to the MEMS IMU developed, static tests, rate tests, thermal tests are implemented to estimate the deterministic error such as bias, scale factor, and non-orthogonality. Allan variance method is used to characterize the stochastic noise in inertial sensor. Experimental results are afforded and evaluated.