068. Drone IMU Calibration

If you're looking to make the jump from sporadic revenue to scalable and consistent growth in your drone business, TDT Pro is for you! Check out The Drone Trainer Pro right here! This week while the temperatures were hovering just above freezing, I decided to conduct a IMU calibration on my DJI Phantom 4 Pro. After completing the calibration, I wondered what the rest of the drone community was up to, and reached out to find out all of the best practices! What is a drone's IMU? IMU (inertial measurement unit) calibration is one of those things that is critical to keeping your drone straight and level. The IMU is a sensor that detects motion along a horizontal plane, as well as increases and decreases in altitude. Having a tightly calibrated IMU is critical to having the drone know what zero motion feels like. Without a good IMU calibration, your drone will potentially think that it's drifting off in a certain direction, and then create an opposite input. Yeah, it's going to become very difficult to control and won't be stable in flight at all! My IMU calibration This week with the temperatures just above zero, I conducted a IMU calibration in the middle of a wide open field without any interference. It's important to do them without any interference, as a bad calibration can lead to disaster once in the air and away from the "calibrated" interference. Same goes for the compass, but I'll leave that for a separate discussion. During the calibration, the DJI tutorial showed the drone with the props removed, however I did mine with the props still attached. There are three reasons that I can think of that they'd recommend props removed during the calibration. First is if the drone was to somehow start up during calibration, you likely wouldn't have control. Second is that you may not get the drone totally level during calibration. And finally, depending on the composition of your props, there is a possibility they could interfere with a clean IMU calibration. Anyway, even with the props on I was able to precisely calibrate the IMU. I was further able to confirm this by taking the drone to another location with a lot of interference, and was still able to fly it without any issue at all. Thats a good thing to remember if you're looking for a place to calibrate your drone's IMU. Choose a location without any interference, or as little as possible, and then move to your area of higher interference to fly. Don't do it the other way around, as I mentioned above, it can cause all kinds of problems. What does everyone else say? Knowing that it's always best to share information so that we can all improve, I decided to ask my drone community what their best practices are when it comes to IMU calibration. There are a variety of responses and techniques, and I'm sure you can pick up a little tidbit of info from each one. Let's see what the community has to say in this week's episode! Final thoughts on drone IMU calibration As can you see by the comments above, there are some varying opinions when it comes to calibrating your IMU. Some say if it's not broke, don't try and fix it, while others are suggesting doing it before every flight. I think that doing it, over not doing it at all is a good idea, but make sure that you do it in an interference free area. Keep it away from all metal, bluetooth, watches, cellphones, power-lines, vehicles, rebar, and anything else that you think could cause interference. Also to answer a few of the above questions, yes temperature can play into your IMU calibration. I'm not 100% sure about high temperatures, but colder temperatures definitely have an effect on calibration and allowing your drone to operate in cooler weather. I have a full article on winter drone flight tips, where I discuss the benefits of calibrating in a cooler environment. As I don't live in a screaming hot place, I'm looking to you to let me know if you've experienced differences in calibrations in high temperatures. What do you say? After reading all of the opinions above, what do you think? Are you going to modify the way that you conduct your drone's IMU calibration? Or are you going to keep on keeping on? Regardless, let us know below in the comments so that we can keep on learning from each other! When you're finished leaving your comment, get out there and fly! Have fun, and be sure to keep the spinny side up!