The Calibration of an Array of Accelerometers

An accelerometer-array calibration method is proposed in this paper by which we estimate not only the accelerometer offsets and scale factors, but also their sensitive directions and positions on a rigid body. These latter parameters are computed from the classical equations that describe the kinematics of rigid bodies, and by measuring the accelerometer-array displacements using a magnetic sensor. Unlike calibration schemes that were reported before, the one proposed here guarantees that the estimated accelerometer-array parameters are globally optimum in the least-squares sense. The calibration procedure is tested on OCTA, a rigid body equipped with six biaxial accelerometers. It is demonstrated that the new method significantly reduces the errors when computing the angular velocity of a rigid body from the accelerometer measurements.