2015 Early Achievement Award

Presented to: Dr. Alexander A. Trusov

Citation: For research, development, and demonstration of ultra-low dissipation
inertial MEMS sensors that may enable low-cost IMUs
with North-finding and inertial navigation grade performance.

Dr. Alexander A. Trusov is a Senior Scientist with the Advanced PNT Systems organization at Northrop Grumman in Woodland Hills, CA. He leads an advanced technology R&D portfolio in Dynamic Self-Calibration and Coriolis Vibratory Gyroscopes spanning four orders of magnitude in performance and C-SWAP.

During 2009-2012 Dr. Trusov was a Principal Investigator at the UC Irvine MicroSystems Lab where he ran multiple US Navy and DARPA efforts that developed low dissipation inertial MEMS with novel mechanizations, folded MEMS IMUs, and 3-D micromachining of fused quartz resonators. Dr. Trusov was the lead developer of the groundbreaking silicon MEMS Quad Mass Gyroscope (QMG) – an ultra-low dissipation Class II Coriolis Vibratory Gyroscope. The QMG achieves symmetric Q-factor above one million and dissipation time constant of several minutes, a two orders of magnitude improvement over existing state of the art. The complete symmetry and ultra-low dissipation of energy provide the QMG with real-time interchangeable low noise rate mode and wide range whole angle mode. The QMG is capable of Dynamic Self-Calibration, which is a system mechanization that leverages structural symmetry to observe and compensate bias and scale factor errors in real time. The combination of very low Angle Random Walk performance with Dynamic Self-Calibration is expected to enable next generation inertial systems with drastically reduced cost, size, weight, and power.

Dr. Trusov received a B.S. and M.S. in Applied Mathematics and Mechanics from the Moscow State University, and a M.S. and Ph.D. in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from the University of California, Irvine. He has published over 75 papers, has 10 issued U.S. patents, and was a recipient of best paper awards at several international conferences. Dr. Trusov serves on technical program committees for various IEEE and ION conferences, is a member of the ASME and ION, and a Senior Member of the IEEE.