A 6-DOF acceleration sensor with cylindrical configuration

The paper introduces a novel 6-DOF acceleration sensor based on 8 dual-axes linear accelerometers, which possesses small volume, high reliability, elevated error resistance, and easy-to-integrate properties. To reduce impacts resulting from installation errors of linear accelerometers, and improve redundancy of the sensor, a new spatial geometric configuration of the sensor is proposed. The Geometric Dilution of Procession (GDOP) is introduced to evaluate the configuration of the sensor. Compared with the typical sensor configuration constituted by six linear accelerometers, the value of GDOP is decreased by 35.45%. Furthermore, error models of the sensor are deduced with respect to installation errors of linear accelerometers, and an absolute error compensation algorithm of the sensor is presented. Relative measurement errors of gravity acceleration decrease from 5.18% to 1.68%. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed sensor is effectiveness in practice.