Influence of sensor imperfections to electronic compass attitude accuracy

摘要

Analysis of various errors of orientation and motion sensors and their influence on resulting compassattitude information are investigated and quantified in this paper. A triple-axis acceleration sensor and atriple-axis magnetic sensor are considered to form a compass module giving full orientation information(attitude). 3D-compass module with PCB-fluxgate sensors and off-shelf acceleration sensor is introduced.Three main sensor error sources are discussed separately and their contribution to final compass headingaccuracy is investigated. These are sensor orthogonality error, linearity error and ADC quantization noise.The influence of these errors is simulated on artificial group of test cases which evenly covers variousorientations of the compass module. It was found that the errors in the accelerometric system havemajor influence on the heading accuracy. It was concluded that even low-resolution AD converters mayhave only a minor influence on the system accuracy, while the dominant error sources are sensor tripletnonorthogonality and sensor non-linearity.