An Efficient Calibration Method for Triaxial Gyroscope

TL;DR

This paper introduces a rapid, low-cost calibration method for triaxial gyroscopes that achieves high accuracy in about one minute without requiring specialized equipment, suitable for practical applications.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel servomotor-aided calibration technique with a six-observation design and recursive least squares estimation, improving efficiency and robustness over traditional methods.

Findings

Calibration time reduced to approximately one minute

Method achieves comparable accuracy to traditional turntable calibration

Significant accuracy improvement over uncalibrated low-cost gyroscopes

Abstract

This paper presents an efficient servomotor-aided calibration method for the triaxial gyroscope. The entire calibration process only requires approximately one minute, and does not require high-precision equipment. This method is based on the idea that the measurement of the gyroscope should be equal to the rotation speed of the servomotor. A six-observation experimental design is proposed to minimize the maximum variance of the estimated scale factors and biases. In addition, a fast converging recursive linear least square estimation method is presented to reduce computational complexity. The simulation results reflect the robustness of the calibration method under normal and extreme conditions. We experimentally demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed method on a robot arm, and implement the method on a microcontroller. We verify the calibration results of the proposed method by comparing with a traditional turntable approach, and the experiment indicates that the results of these two methods are comparable. By comparing the calibrated low-cost gyroscope reading with the reading from a high-precision gyroscope, we can conclude that our method significantly increases the gyroscope's accuracy.