PCA-aided calibration of systems comprising multiple unbiased sensors

The calibration of sensors comprising inertial measurement units is crucial for reliable and accurate navigation. Such calibration is usually performed with specialized expensive rotary tables or requires sophisticated signal processing based on iterative minimization of nonlinear functions, which is prone to get stuck at local minima. We propose a novel calibration algorithm based on principal component analysis. The algorithm results in a closed-form formula for the sensor sensitivity axes and scale factors. We illustrate the proposed algorithm with simulation experiments, in which we assess the calibration accuracy in the case of calibration of a system consisting of 12 single-axis gyroscopes.