Calibration of three-axis fluxgate magnetometers with nonlinear least square method

The accuracy of three-axis magnetometers is limited by different scales, bias of each axis and nonorthogonality between axes, which is usually lower than that of scalar magnetometers. In this paper, the nonlinear least square method is proposed to calibrate three-axis magnetometers. The validity of this method was proved by simulation, in which the estimated parameters of the error model are close to prearranged parameters. In experiment, a three-axis fluxgate magnetometer (DM-050), a two dimensional nonmagnetic rotation equipment and a proton magnetometer (GSM-19T) were used. The scalar value of magnetic field was obtained by proton magnetometer and considered to be the true value. The calibration performance of unscented Kalman filter (UKF), two-step algorithm and nonlinear least square were compared. Experimental results show that the error average and standard deviation of nonlinear least square are the least among the three methods. After calibration, the average of scalar error is reduced from −76.2 nT to −0.00093 nT and the standard deviation is reduced from 10.832 nT to 4.298 nT. The results suggest an effective way for the calibration of three-axis fluxgate magnetometers.