A Novel Algorithm for Optimal Placement of Multiple Inertial Sensors to Improve the Sensing Accuracy

This paper proposes a novel algorithm to determine the optimal orientation of sensing axes of redundant inertial sensors such as accelerometers and gyroscopes (gyros) for increasing the sensing accuracy. In this paper, we have proposed a novel iterative algorithm to find the optimal sensor configuration. The proposed algorithm utilizes the majorization-minimization (MM) algorithm and the duality principle to find the optimal configuration. Unlike the state-of-the-art approaches which are mainly geometrical in nature and restricted to sensors' noise being uncorrelated, the proposed algorithm gives the exact orientations of the sensors and can easily deal with the cases of correlated noise. The proposed algorithm has been implemented and tested via numerical simulation in the MATLAB. The simulation results show that the algorithm converges to the optimal configurations and shows the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.