Simple Calibration of Three-Axis Accelerometers with Freely Rotating Vertical Bench

This article presents a dynamic calibration procedure for triaxial accelerometers characterized by a very simple and low-cost setup, where the calibration bench consists of a vertically, freely rotating wheel. To keep the setup as simple as possible, the necessary prior knowledge about the geometry and the motion of the bench has been minimized: the only required constraint is the verticality of the rotation plane, which can be simply achieved in practice by means of a level tool. No prior knowledge is required about the bench rotation, as the calibration procedure estimates both the accelerometer parameters and the bench motion. The precision achieved by the proposed calibration has been tested on synthetic data to prove the absence of estimation biases and to evaluate the potential accuracy, and on real data (from a MEMS accelerometer) to evaluate the achievable precision.