Application of improved fast dynamic allan variance for the characterization of MEMS gyroscope on UAV

Microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) are core components in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). The precision of MEMS sensors is very important when the GPS signal is invalid. However, the precision and performance of MEMS sensors will be degraded by the changing of environment. Therefore, estimation and identification of the various noise terms existing in MEMS sensors are deemed to be necessary. The Allan variance is a common and standard method to analyze MEMS sensors, but it cannot be used to analyze the dynamic characteristics. The dynamic Allan variance (DAVAR) is a sliding version of the Allan variance. It is a practical tool that could represent the nonstationary behavior of the MEMS signal. As the DAVAR needs to estimate the Allan variance at each time epoch, the computation time grows significantly with the length of the signal series. In this paper, in the case of MEMS gyroscope on UAV, an improved fast DAVAR algorithm based on the choice of relevant time is proposed to shorten the computation time. As an experimental validation, numerical experiments are conducted under the proposed method. The results demonstrate that the improved method could greatly increase the computation speed and does not affect the accuracy of estimation.