Integrated calibration of magnetic gradient tensor system

Measurement precision of a magnetic gradient tensor system is not only connected with the imperfect performance of magnetometers such as bias, scale factor, non-orthogonality and misalignment errors, but also connected with the external soft-iron and hard-iron magnetic distortion fields when the system is used as a strapdown device. So an integrated scalar calibration method is proposed in this paper. In the first step, a mathematical model for scalar calibration of a single three-axis magnetometer is established, and a least squares ellipsoid fitting algorithm is proposed to estimate the detailed error parameters. For the misalignment errors existing at different magnetometers caused by the installation process and misalignment errors aroused by ellipsoid fitting estimation, a calibration method for combined misalignment errors is proposed in the second step to switch outputs of different magnetometers into the ideal reference orthogonal coordinate system. In order to verify effectiveness of the proposed method, simulation and experiment with a cross-magnetic gradient tensor system are performed, and the results show that the proposed method estimates error parameters and improves the measurement accuracy of magnetic gradient tensor greatly. •Integrated calibration of magnetic gradient tensor system is achieved.•Error parameters are estimated using a least squares ellipsoid fitting algorithm.•Linear and nonlinear estimations are proposed for the combined misalignment errors.