Acquisition of expandable current profiler based on multisensory data fusion

Based on the typical seawater current measure principle of Expendable Current Profiler (XCP), a collection circuit consisted of microvolt signal amplifier, electronic compass, gyroscope and processor is designed in this paper. The electronic compass is deployed to identify the angle between the electrode axis and the north of geomagnetism. Because of the impact of characteristics, installation and environment error, there will be some error in the course angle detected by the electronic compass, and this will impact the measure accuracy of the seawater current data directly. Then the course angles are corrected by using a Kalman filter to fuse the measured data of electronic compass and gyroscope in real time. According to experiment, this method can greatly improve the density and accuracy of the current velocity and current direction.