Amaximumlikelihood estimator is presented for self-calibrating both accelerometers and gyroscopes in an inertial sensor array, including scale factors, misalignments, biases, and sensor positions. By simultaneous estimation of the calibration parameters and the motion dynamics of the array, external equipment is not required for the method. A computational efficient iterative optimizationmethod is proposed where the calibration problem is divided into smaller subproblems. Further, an identifiability analysis of the calibration problem is presented. The analysis shows that it is sufficient to know the magnitude of the local gravity vector and the average scale factor gain of the gyroscopes, and that the array is exposed to two types ofmotions for the calibration problemto bewell defined. The proposedestimator is evaluatedby real-worldexperimentsand byMonteCarlo simulations. The results show that the parameters can be consistently estimated and that the calibration significantly improves the accuracy of the motion estimation. This enables on-the-fly calibration of small inertial sensors arrays by simply twisting them by hand.
Funding Agencies|Wallenberg Autonomous Systems and Software Program (WASP); Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research (SSF) via the project ASSEMBLE