Design and study of error compensation method for improving the precision of angular rates of nongyro inertial measurement units

Nongyro inertial measurement units (NGIMUs) use only microelectromechanical system or microaccelerometers replacing gyroscopes to compute the motion of a moving body. The angular information of NGIMU can be acquired from linear acceleration information. In this work, a new nine-accelerometer configuration of NGIMU is presented with a built experiment system. To improve the precision of the estimated angular rate, a compensation algorithm is used to get the correct accelerometer output. It is provided under the existence of the accelerometer mounting error, which seriously affects NGIMU performance. The simulation study of the proposed methods for estimating the angular rate is investigated based on the present NGIMU configuration. Additionally, the experiment verification using the two-axis turntable to measure the angular rate is also performed. The simulation and experiment results show the feasibility of the configuration and methods. In the experiment, the relative error of this nine-accelerometer configuration is around 1% when the measured angular rate ranges from 0 to 200 deg/s. (c) 2010 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers. [DOI: 10.1117/1.3481145]