Progress Toward An Inertial Grade Fiber optic Gyroscope

R. Y. Liu, R. C. Dankwort, T. F. El-Wailly, M. S. Bielas

Abstract:	Modern inertial navigation systems require highly reliable, wide dynamic range sensing which is not easily achieved with mechanical gyroscopes. It has been shown that fiber optic gyros can meet these requirements and, at the same time, offer many additional advantages. Among these are low weight, low power consumption, rapid start-up time, long shelf life, no mechanical dither, flexible geometries, no "g" sensitivity, and high "g" survivability. Further, and perhaps even more importantly, they offer the potential for low cost. Tremendous progress has been made in the past twelve years toward the realization of practical fiber optic gyroscopes. Unsatisfactory performance in the areas of scale factor linearity and repeatability have, however, presented a barrier to the attainment of inertial grade utilization. A closed-loop interferometric fiber optic gyroscope developed by Honeywell, exhibiting uncompensated 30 ppm scale factor linearity and 10 ppm scale factor repeatability, has broken this barrier. This 16 cm fiber optic gyroscope is also demonstrating 0.0016 deg/hr random noise and 0.02 deg/hr bias stability. In this paper, the performance of the 16 cm closed-loop fiber optic gyroscope will be presented. Several other Honeywell interferometric fiber optic gyroscopes with performance spanning a wide range of interest will also be discussed
Published in:	Proceedings of the 1989 National Technical Meeting of The Institute of Navigation January 23 - 26, 1989 San Mateo, CA
Pages:	251 - 255
Cite this article:	Liu, R. Y., Dankwort, R. C., El-Wailly, T. F., Bielas, M. S., "Progress Toward An Inertial Grade Fiber optic Gyroscope," Proceedings of the 1989 National Technical Meeting of The Institute of Navigation, San Mateo, CA, January 1989, pp. 251-255.
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