Experimental Design for the Calibration of Tri-axial Magnetometers

The calibration and its associated experimental design scheme for the tri-axial magnetometers are explored in this paper. For the widely used 9-parameter model of tri-axial Magnetometers, based on experimental design of Tri-axial accelerometers, a 12-observation experiment scheme, whose observations are located in the vertices of an icosahedron, is presented to reduce estimation error. As this 12-observation scheme is proved to be rotatable, before experiment, it is not required to identify the direction of the magnetic field of the Earth. For this 12-observation experiment scheme, a simple parameter estimation algorithm is presented, which can be easily implemented in a micro-controller with low computational capacity. Although, this calibration method utilizes the projections of the local Earth magnetic field as calibration inputs, a high precision turntable is not essential for ensuring desired calibration accuracy.