Temperature compensation model of MEMS inertial sensors based on neural network

Micro-electromechanical Systems (MEMS) inertial sensors are lightweight, small size and low-cost sensors that consume less power energy compared to their high-precision bulky counterparts. However, this miniaturization is a double-edged sword and MEMS-based inertial sensors suffer from various error sources, noises and instabilities. Indeed, inertial sensor errors vary with time, temperature and from turn on to turn on. In order to exploit the full potential of a MEMS-based inertial navigation system (INS), and to enhance its accuracy, it is indispensable to develop a temperature-dependent model that compensates these errors. Traditional temperature compensation methods rely on polynomial regression method, which fails to take into account the nonlinearities inherent in the sensor errors. This paper proposes a new temperature compensation model for a full inertial measurement unit (IMU), based on a radial basis function neural network (RBFNN) that compensates the significant deterministic errors of both accelerometer and gyroscope triads in a wide temperature range. A high precision rate table and a thermal chamber are used for accurate testing. The effectiveness of the method is investigated with various static and dynamics tests in the laboratory and with a car, and results are compared with the traditional polynomial fitting method.