Design and Calibration for a Smart Inertial Measurement Unit for Autonomous Helicopters Using MEMS Sensors

Abstract

In this paper, we present the design of 3D inertial measurement unit(IMU), which consists of 3D accelerometers, 3D gyroscopes and 3D magnetic sensors for automatic control of aerial robots. It has characteristics with very small size, low power consumption, high distinguishing ability and inexpensive. The novel automatic initial calibration of 3D accelerometers and 3D magnetic sensor, based on Newton's method, is implemented. The experiments show the hardware design is in effect and the calibration can reduces the offset error, scaling error and non-orthogonal error efficiently