Experimental investigation on the Euler-type location and orientation algorithm using magnetic field and its gradient tensor

Abstract The magnetic source location has wide application prospects in the fields of space exploration, non-destructive testing, security monitoring and target tracking. A constrained Euler location algorithm is applied to the location of a small current-carrying multi-turn ring coil, which is the closed analytic form of the position solution. The error of position solution for the traditional Euler location algorithm is deduced analytically. An experimental device of three-axis fluxgate magnetometer (TAFM) cross-array is constructed. The interference of ambient magnetic field is filtered from the magnetic data by the digital band-pass filter, and the magnetic field of the multi-turn coil is restructured by the least-squares fitting. The Euler and constrained Euler location algorithms are compared with the numerical simulation and the experimental data, and the results show that the constrained Euler location precision of the location algorithm is better than the Euler one. And more, experimental tests verify that the relative error of position solution is less than 10% for the two location algorithms in the given distance range.