MONITORING AND DETECTION OF SENSOR ERRORS IN INERTIAL MEASUREMENT SYSTEMS

The invention relates to a method for detecting malfunctions (F) in inertial measurement units (4, 5) which are used in a vehicle (22) to measure angular velocities (AA) and specific forces (BB), wherein use is made of two inertial measurement units (4, 5) each with a plurality of sensors, comprising accelerometers and gyroscopic sensors, wherein a first inertial measurement unit (4) is used as a master inertial measurement unit, wherein a second inertial measurement unit (5), the performance of which may be lower than that of the first inertial measurement unit (4), is used as a slave inertial measurement unit, wherein measurements by the master inertial measurement unit (4) are used as reference values for compensating for measurements by the slave inertial measurement unit (5) by estimating fault model parameters with respect to the master inertial measurement unit (4) in order to detect a malfunction (F) on the basis of in each case two corresponding sensor signals from the two inertial measurement units (4, 5) by means of comparison, wherein that unit of the two inertial measurement units (4, 5) whose movement estimation calculated in a downstream Kalman filter (13, 14) in each case in an object tracking unit (17) results in an incorrect prediction of the calculated positions of objects in the environment of the vehicle (22) is detected as faulty.