Magnetometer with an automatic distortion compensation and its usage for INS aiding

In this paper we describe a new magnetometer sensor head which is capable to measure the complete calibration circle as one data sample. The new sensor allows for online determination of hard and soft iron distortions and its usage to compensate for their effect on the heading measurement. It provides capability to the magnetometer to compensate for local distortions caused by sensor/aircraft assembly. We describe the construction of the sensor and the influence of the local magnetic field changes will be illustrated. The proposed solution leads to a sensor array and we will describe construction of the single unit and its graphical interface. Then the results provided by the new sensor concept will be presented and the performance of this approach will be compared. At the end we provide method of utilizing the compensated data into an IMU mechanization algorithm where it is used to determine offsets and scale factors of the IMU inertial sensors.