Magnetometer heading estimation through online calibration for land navigation applications

For land navigation applications, the integration of the magnetometer with the combination of MEMS-INS and the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) give excellent results. During land navigation applications, the magnetometer’s heading can also be used during the GNSS outages. The calibration of the magnetometer is indispensable to calculate its accurate heading. There exist several methods for magnetometer calibration. Some are offline and some are online calibration techniques. In this paper, a calibration method is proposed to estimate the magnetometer’s parameters through online calibration in run time. In this method, the reference magnetic field is calculated from the World Magnetic Model (WMM-2020). Moreover, reference roll, pitch and heading are provided from some other sources such as GNSS, Attitude Heading Reference System (AHRS), or reference INS. For different roll and pitch sectors, calibration parameters are estimated and stored. These parameters are used for magnetometer online calibration during the field testing. Both the headings obtained by the online calibration and conventional lab calibrations are analysed. Furthermore, the heading estimated through the online calibration is autonomous and fast. Subsequently, there is no user involvement in this online calibration technique and no specific movements to the device are provided. The heading obtained by novel technique is as accurate as obtained by conventional offline lab calibration.

On the UPMSat-2 Attitude Determination and Control Subsystem’s magnetometers integration

In the present work, a method for magnetometer calibration through least squares fitting is presented. This method has been applied over the magnetometer’s data set obtained during the integration tests of the Attitude Determination and Control Subsystem (ADCS) of UPMSat-2. The UPMSat-2 mission is a 50-kg satellite designed and manufactured by the Technical University of Madrid (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid), and finally launched in September 2020. The satellite has three fluxgate magnetometers (one of them experimental) whose calibration is critical to obtain correct measurements to be used by the ADCS. Among several mathematical methods suitable to obtain the calibration parameters, an ordinary least squares fitting algorithm is selected as a first step of the calibration process. The surface estimated is an ellipsoid, surface represented by the magnetometer’s measures of the Earth magnetic field in a point of the space. The calibration elements of the magnetometers are related to the coefficients of the estimated ellipsoid.