MISALIGNMENT CALIBRATION OF MULTISENSOR SYSTEMS FOR HORIZONTAL DIRECTIONAL DRILLING

Ales Zikmund – Jan Vcelak

   A new method was developed for calibration a multi-sensory system which contains one tri-axial accelerometer and two tri-axial magnetometers. The system is used for navigation of horizontal direction drilling. The method calculates the misalignment error (angular and offset) to mutually align all sensors. Specific rotations of the whole system are carried out and the errors are calculated by the optimization method from the recorded sensor data. By applying of correction matrices into the navigation al-gorithm, the error of the navigation unit was reduced to 0.5 meters in the 30-meter distance.

Keywords: horizontal drilling, magnetometer, accelerometer, calibration

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