Experiment evaluation of rapid error compensation for magnetic compass in underwater vehicle

This paper puts emphasis on the following three main areas. First, it highlights the measurement error forms of magnetic compass and analyzes soft magnetic interference and hard magnetic interference which influence the precision of magnetic compass. Second, the paper proposes a rapid error compensation method based on ellipse hypothesis which uses direct least square to estimate the parameters of an ellipse quickly. Third, in this paper land experiment is conducted in order to evaluate the effect of compensation method. The result of experiment verifies that the method is efficient and can be utilized in underwater vehicle´s navigation. According to the statistic analysis of compensated heading error, the ranging improves 63 percent on straight route and 82 percent on curve route referring to a higher accuracy GPS attitude determining system.