A Comprehensive Overview of Inertial Sensor Calibration Techniques

Inertial measurement unit (IMU) comprising of the accelerometer and gyroscope is prone to various deterministic errors like bias, scale factor, and nonorthogonality, which need to be calibrated carefully. In this paper, a survey has been carried out over different calibration techniques that try to estimate these error parameters. These calibration schemes are discussed under two broad categories, that is, calibration with high-end equipment and without any equipment. Traditional calibration techniques use high-precision equipment to generate references for calibrating inertial sensors and are generally laboratory-based setup. Inertial sensor calibration without the use of any costly equipment is further studied under two subcategories: ones based on multiposition method and others with Kalman filtering framework. Later, a brief review of vision-based inertial sensor calibration schemes is also provided in this work followed by a discussion which indicates different shortcomings and future scopes in the area of inertial sensor calibration.