A novel calibration method of electronic compass based on multi-redundancy

A novel algorithm of multi-redundancy based on 12-position calibration method for electronic compass is presented in this paper. The errors sources of the electronic compass are analyzed. Such as installation misalignment error, hard iron error, soft iron error, scale factor error, non-orthogonal error and offsets error. And this paper simplifies the error model. Firstly, according to the error model and the 12-position calibration method, 12 basic integrated error parameters can be calculated. Then we can use the magnetometer output value after the calibration. Therefore, the heading of the compass has presented by multi-redundancy method. This method can rectify all the parameters of the model through the simulation of the LabVIEW and Matlab. It just requires a special cuboid during the process of the calibration which is made of aluminum. Moreover, the calibration method is convenient and easy to use. The experiment results show that this algorithm is effective and easy to realize. And the precision of heading angle is 1 degree. It is nearly 10 times higher than before without calibration.