Characterization of a MEMS accelerometer for an underground mine positioning system

The application of interest involves using accelerometers and an underground mine positioning system. The distance traveled is estimated by double integrating accelerometer measurements. But this calculation can be incorrect due to the presence of bias offset and scaling factor. This paper characterizes MEMS accelerometer and presents measurement results from a test set up. This test set up consists of a custom pendulum test bed, which is described in this paper and was built to test dual axis accelerometer. For a pendulum with small angular distance, calculated bias offsets and scale factors are presented.