Characterization and calibration of MEMS inertial sensors for state and parameter estimation applications

Widening applications of inertial sensors have triggered the search for cost effective sensors and those based on MEMS technology have been gaining popularity and widespread use particularly for lower cost applications. However, inertial sensors are subject to various error sources and characteristics of these should be modelled carefully. Corrective calibration is required for successful use for anything but the most trivial applications, body state estimation and navigation being important application areas. In this paper, we review the deterministic error and random noise sources for these sensors, consider a number of inertial sensor calibration tests to provide models for these errors and derive the calibration parameters for MEMS based strapdown IMUs. We carry out these tests and present the results for a low cost and popular IMU. We further provide performance results for an example application of body state and parameter estimation using the derived calibration data and discuss our results.