In this paper, an integrated MEMS gyroscope array method composed of two levels of optimal filtering was designed to improve the accuracy of gyroscopes. In the firstlevel filtering, several identical gyroscopes were combined through Kalman filtering into a single effective device, whose performance could surpass that of any individual sensor. The key of the performance improving lies in the optimal estimation of the random noise sources such as rate random walk and angular random walk for compensating the measurement values. Especially, the cross correlation between the noises from different gyroscopes of the same type was used to establish the system noise covariance matrix and the measurement noise covariance matrix for Kalman filtering to improve the performance further. Secondly, an integrated Kalman filter with six states was designed to further improve the accuracy with the aid of external sensors such as magnetometers and accelerometers in attitude determination. Experiments showed that three gyroscopes with a bias drift of 35 degree per hour could be combined into a virtual gyroscope with a drift of 1.07 degree per hour through the first-level filter, and the bias drift was reduced to 0.53 degree per hour after the second-level filtering. It proved that the proposed integrated MEMS gyroscope array is capable of improving the accuracy of the MEMS gyroscopes, which provides the possibility of using these low cost MEMS sensors in high-accuracy application areas.
Keywords: MEMS gyroscopes; accuracy improving; gyroscope array.; optimal filtering; random noise.