IMU Calibration platform

Abstract

The main purpose of this project is to design, integrate and evaluate a rotatory low cost calibration platform for inertial sensors. This platform will be used to characterize and estimate systematic errors of an IMU, to improve the quality of the data and the performance of its sensors. The motivation to develop this project comes from the growth on popularity and technological progress in MEMS based IMUs, because these low cost inertial sensors need a regular calibration the necessity of a cheap method of calibration appears. The design of the calibration platform has been made taking into account several requirements specified by the CTTC. Some current expensive solutions have been analysed and studied in order to understand the technology and then to select properly each component of the designed platform. The integration of the platform has been done in the laboratory with the help of a previously designed Solidworks model. The mechanical integration has been performed in the laboratory using equipment such as a power supply, an oscilloscope and a function generator. The platform has been submitted to different validation tests, both software and hardware, to ensure that the system requirements are accomplished. Once the platform has been validated, a series of manoeuvres has been designed in order to obtain the data to characterize and calibrate the main IMU errors. Finally some calibration tests based on an inertial sensor have been performed in order to validate the correct operation of the platform. Several calibration tests have been carried out on an inertial sensor and the calibrated and non-calibrated data have been compared.