Calibration of an IMU Using 3-D Rotation Platform

This paper presents complete procedures to calibrate an inertial measurement unit (IMU) using a 3-D rotation platform. Previous works show that all the sensors can be calibrated separately using different calibration tools or methods. However, there is no guarantee that all the calibrated sensors are aligned to one coordinate system. In consequence, existence of axes correlations between the sensors can have big impact on orientation or position determination. Besides, very few literatures report the detail of gyroscope calibration without professional facilities. Different from the previous works, the calibration procedures reported in this paper not only focus on the scalar and bias removal, but also cover the correction of angle correlations between different sensors. In addition, the calibration of gyroscope relying only on 3-D rotation platform is also given. The calibration results have been validated using professional calibration tools and commercial IMU module. As a result, our calibration approaches are able to achieve a similar calibration performance as the one using professional tools as well as minimize the angle correlations between sensors.