A Cost-Effective Automatic Calibration Platform for Inertial Measurement Units

In the last decades, the growing use of small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) has resulted in an escalating demand for low-cost Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs), usually made of Micro Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) to measure accelerations, angular velocities and, optionally, magnetic field components along three axes. An accurate calibration of these devices is needed for the precise determination of aircraft attitude. Although their versatile applications, MEMS-based IMUs exhibit a high level of noise, including both systematic and stochastic errors. Systematic errors need an appropriate calibration process to be identified and eliminated. This paper presents a portable low-cost IMU calibration platform to provide the parameters to mitigate the errors that characterize this kind of devices. Using three servomotors positioned to enable rotations around three orthogonal axes, the system allows for calibrating IMUs both statically and dynamically. To prove the effectiveness of the proposed platform, a performance evaluation is provided, showcasing the difference in estimating the attitude of an IMU, calibrated with and without the use of the platform.