A Fast and Accurate Accelerometer and Magnetometer Alignment Algorithm

A computationally efficient algorithm for axes alignment of a 3-axis accelerometer and a 3-axis magnetometer is introduced. The proposed algorithm applies when the two sensors are fixed on the same rigid platform and individually calibrated. It exploits the magnetic inclination phenomenon to derive both the inclination angle, and, the axes alignment rotation matrix. It is more than 50 times faster than the existing algorithms based on the same principle and using the Newton-Raphson or the gradient descent methods. The algorithm's accuracy and computational efficiency are demonstrated using multiple measurement sets as well as simulated data sets.