Calibration of MEMS Accelerometer Based on Kalman Filter and the Improved Six Position Method

—The measurement precision of Micro Electronic Mechanical System (MEMS) accelerometer are influenced by zero drift, scale factor and installation error. In order to increase the measurement accuracy of the MEMS accelerometer, an improved calibration method is proposed on the basis of traditional six position method. The raw measurements of the MEMS accelerometer not divided by the scale factor are filtered by the Kalman Filter first, then the filtered values of six positions are calibrated to obtain the error model of MEMS accelerometer. The error model is verified by the experiments, and the results show that the measurement precision of the calibrated MEMS accelerometer is increased to 0.0066 m/s from the uncalibrated 0.2646 m/s, and the measurement precision of pitch calculated by the calibrated MEMS accelerometer is increased to 0.145 degree. It has been verified that error model based on Kalman Filter and improved six location method are feasible and effective. Therefore, this error model can be very valuable in promoting MEMS accelerometer to be widely used in engineering field.