Hybrid Deep Recurrent Neural Networks for Noise Reduction of MEMS-IMU with Static and Dynamic Conditions

Micro-electro-mechanical system inertial measurement unit (MEMS-IMU), a core component in many navigation systems, directly determines the accuracy of inertial navigation system; however, MEMS-IMU system is often affected by various factors such as environmental noise, electronic noise, mechanical noise and manufacturing error. These can seriously affect the application of MEMS-IMU used in different fields. Focus has been on MEMS gyro since it is an essential and, yet, complex sensor in MEMS-IMU which is very sensitive to noises and errors from the random sources. In this study, recurrent neural networks are hybridized in four different ways for noise reduction and accuracy improvement in MEMS gyro. These are two-layer homogenous recurrent networks built on long short term memory (LSTM-LSTM) and gated recurrent unit (GRU-GRU), respectively; and another two-layer but heterogeneous deep networks built on long short term memory-gated recurrent unit (LSTM-GRU) and a gated recurrent unit-long short term memory (GRU-LSTM). Practical implementation with static and dynamic experiments was carried out for a custom MEMS-IMU to validate the proposed networks, and the results show that GRU-LSTM seems to be overfitting large amount data testing for three-dimensional axis gyro in the static test. However, for X-axis and Y-axis gyro, LSTM-GRU had the best noise reduction effect with over 90% improvement in the three axes. For Z-axis gyroscope, LSTM-GRU performed better than LSTM-LSTM and GRU-GRU in quantization noise and angular random walk, while LSTM-LSTM shows better improvement than both GRU-GRU and LSTM-GRU networks in terms of zero bias stability. In the dynamic experiments, the Hilbert spectrum carried out revealed that time-frequency energy of the LSTM-LSTM, GRU-GRU, and GRU-LSTM denoising are higher compared to LSTM-GRU in terms of the whole frequency domain. Similarly, Allan variance analysis also shows that LSTM-GRU has a better denoising effect than the other networks in the dynamic experiments. Overall, the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of deep learning algorithms in MEMS gyro noise reduction, among which LSTM-GRU network shows the best noise reduction effect and great potential for application in the MEMS gyroscope area.