Integrated Calibration for the Cross Magnetic Gradiometer

The magnetic gradiometer onboard a maneuverable vehicle is subjected to not only magnetometer errors and misalignment errors but also magnetic interference of vehicle. Measurement precision of the magnetic gradiometer is greatly affected by those errors, so an integrated error calibration method is proposed in this paper. Firstly, considering vector magnetometer errors and magnetic interference, an integrated error calibration model for vector magnetometer is established, and ellipsoid fitting parameters are calculated by the least square algorithm under ellipsoid restriction, then the error calibration matrices are solved by the Cholesky factorization. Secondly, the misalignment error calibration matrices are obtained by solving the Orthogonal Procrustes problem. Finally, simulations and experiments with a cross magnetic gradiometer are performed to verify effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method. Results show that the proposed method can effectively calibrate the cross magnetic gradiometer, and measurement accuracy of the cross magnetic gradiometer is increased greatly.