Improved calibration of IMU biases in analytic coarse alignment for AHRS

Abstract An improved method for the inertial measurement unit (IMU) calibration of coarse alignment for the low-accuracy attitude heading reference system (AHRS) is proposed in this paper. The sensitivities of the Euler angles with respect to the inertial sensor biases are studied based on the analytic coarse alignment principle, and the errors of earth rotation rate and local gravity in the body frame caused by initial attitude error are analyzed. Then, an improved analytic coarse alignment algorithm with accelerometer and gyro bias calibration in an arbitrary three-position is proposed. Simulation and experiment results show that the novel method can calibrate accelerometer and gyro biases, reduce Euler angle attitude error, and improve navigation precision in practical applications. Moreover, this method can be applied to other low-accuracy inertial navigation systems.