Thermal Calibration of Low Cost MEMS Sensors for Land Vehicle Navigation System

For vehicle navigation, Global Positioning System (GPS) provides long term accurate positions, but only when direct lines of sight to four or more satellites exist. Inertial Navigation Systems (INS), on the other hand, are self contained sensors that can provide short term accurate navigation information. The integration of the two systems can effectively provide continuous navigation data even during GPS signal outages. Traditional inertial systems were heavy, bulky and costly. In the past two decades, the use and development of light weight, compact and cost effective Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) based inertial sensors has made the civilian integrated vehicle navigation systems more affordable. However, these sensors still have to make their way in the field due to their significant error sources such as turn-on biases or scale factors variations. Moreover, the performance characteristics of these sensors are highly dependent on the environmental conditions such as temperature variations. Hence there is a need for the development of accurate, reliable and efficient thermal models to reduce the effect of these errors that can degrade the system performance.