Improvement of magnetometer calibration using Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm

The algorithm, the model, and the measurement strategy are important for the calibration of three-axis magnetometers. A new calibration model with clear physical meaning is proposed, and scale factors, offsets, and nonorthogonal angles are directly illustrated. One limitation of traditional iteration calibration algorithms is the influence of the initial parameters. In this paper, the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm is proposed to solve the troublesome procedure of initial parameter selection, so that it can improve the calibration performance of three-axis magnetometers. The validity of this method is proved by simulation, and the estimated parameters are found to be close to the prearranged parameters. The experimental system mainly consists of a three-axis fluxgate magnetometer (DM-050), two-dimensional nonmagnetic rotation equipment, and a proton magnetometer. The magnetic field intensity is obtained by the proton magnetometer. Experimental results show that the root-mean-square error is reduced from 84.177 to 4.076 nT. In addition, the influence of the initial parameters and measurement strategy is analyzed. Experimental results show that the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm is not sensitive to the initial parameters and the 36 static measurements strategy is more reliable than the rotation measurement strategy. (c) 2014 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.