An efficient calibration method for a novel 6-DOF acceleration sensor system and application to measurement of a vehicle motion

This paper describes a calibration method of 6-DOF acceleration sensor system using dual-axis type linear accelerometers. In our sensor, 6-DOF acceleration can be resolved using the geometrical condition of the accelerometers. Therefore, the measurement error results from the alignment error of the accelerometers. The error analysis shows to be able to identify the error only using some limited linear accelerations. Moreover, in dual-axis type accelerometers, there exit some dependency among each axis-sensitivities. Then, we a new calibration method to above case, and investigate the influence of the error margin included in the calibration. According to the analysis, it is shown that the geometrical alignment error to be identified, which absolute value is small or near zero in comparison with other, can be assumed zero. As a result, more efficient calibration is made possible by decreasing the number of calibration data needed in the calibration. Finally, the availability of the proposed calibration method and our sensor system are verified through vehicle motion experiments. The results show that it has good performance for a complex motion.