Calibration of triaxial magnetometer with ellipsoid fitting method

Abstract

The accuracy of the triaxial strapdown magnetometer is limited by the scaling factor, three-axis orthogonality, offset errors, hard iron and soft iron effects of the platform, a calibration method of the triaxial strapdown magnetometer is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the integrated error model of the triaxial magnetometer is established without simplification, then the error calibration parameters are calculated by the ellipsoid fitting method, and the output of triaxial strapdown magnetometer can be calibrated by the calibration parameters. At last, simulation experiments are built for verification of the proposed calibration method. The simulation results show that the proposed method can reduce 94.6% of magnetometer errors and magnetic inference. The proposed calibration method can effectively calibrate the triaxial strapdown magnetometer.