High-performance inertial measurements using a redundant array of inexpensive gyroscopes (RAIG)

Orientation estimates derived from gyroscopes are limited in quality by the noise and bias characteristics of the sensors. Presently, there is a large gap in price and performance between high-end fiber-optic gyroscopes and inexpensive MEMS gyroscopes. In this paper, we propose using a redundant array of inexpensive gyroscopes (RAIG) in order to obtain significant improvements in performance. A naïve analysis predicts that n gyros should reduce angular rate measurement noise by a factor of √n. In this paper, we describe our custom array of 72 gyros which we use to evaluate the empirical scaling performance. This evaluation includes comparisons between several standard filtering and bias estimation algorithms. In addition, we propose a principled algorithm that exploits non-linear dynamics, significantly improving performance.