Gyroscope drift on mobile phones

Question

Lots of posts talk about the gyro drift problem. Some guys say that the gyro reading has drift, however others say the integration has drift.

1. The raw gyro reading

Answer 1

If the gyro reading has "drift", it is called bias and not drift.

The drift is due to the integration and it occurs even if the bias is exactly zero. The drift is because you are accumulating the white noise of the reading by integration.

For drift cancellation, I highly recommend the Direction Cosine Matrix IMU: Theory manuscript, I have implemented sensor fusion for Shimmer 2 devices based on it.

(Edit: The document is from the MatrixPilot project, which has since moved to Github, and can be found in the Downloads section of the wiki there.)

If you insist on the Kalman filter then see https://stackoverflow.com/q/5478881/341970.

By why are you implementing your own sensor fusion algorithm?

Both Android (SensorManager under Sensor.TYPE_ROTATION_VECTOR) and iPhone (Core Motion) offers its own.