A New Inclination Error Calibration Method of Motion Table Based on Accelerometers

Motion table is a kind of test equipment, which is designed to provide precise angular and rate motions for the testing of measurement sensors and systems. To improve the application precision of the motion table, a new inclination error calibration method of the motion table is proposed in this paper. The error model of the motion table that considered the inclination error is derived, and ellipsoid fitting is employed to calibrate the inclination error of the motion table based on the output of accelerometer. To validate the effectiveness of the new calibration method, position and orientation system (POS) is used to test the motion table. Through establishment of the relationship between inclination error and output of the motion table, the inclination error of the motion table has been compensated in the test process of POS, so that the inclination error can be indicated by the output of POS on the motion table. According to the output of POS before and after inclination error compensation of the motion table, the feasibility of calibration method in this paper is verified, and the experiment results show that the proposed method can improve the application precision of the motion table greatly.