A novel auto-calibration method of the vector magnetometer

Many types of magnetometers have been used to measure the magnetic field vector in a wide range of commercial and military applications. Measured value of magnetometer is corrupted by various errors. In general, magnetometer output errors are caused by random instrument noise, constant biases, scale factor deviations, nonorthogonality of the sensor axes. The high accuracy measurement of magnetic field requires calibrating precisely the magnetometer and compensating measured error of magnetic field. In this paper a novel auto-calibration method of the vector magnetometer is presented. The auto-calibration method can be separated into two steps: fitting ellipsoid to the 3D measured data and solving the model parameters of magnetometer from the fitting ellipsoid. According to the model parameters the measured data is corrected to improve the precision of magnetometer. The ellipsoid fitting algorithm and the model parameter solution are all linear to avoid the nonlinear calculation and the complex iteration. To evaluate the performance of the auto-calibration method, the simulation experiments were performed. The results show that the new method is more convenient the conventional methods, and have many advantages such as: quick, stable, high precision and insensitive to small errors in the data.