Passive fiber optic gyroscope

Area of Science:

• Photonics
• Optical Engineering
• Inertial Navigation

Background:

• Standard fiber optic gyroscopes often require phase modulation.
• Bias errors from birefringent coupling and polarization fluctuations limit performance.

Purpose of the Study:

• To present a novel fiber optic gyroscope design.
• To achieve rotation rate detection without phase modulation.
• To mitigate common error sources in fiber optic gyroscopes.

Main Methods:

• Utilized a fused fiber 3x3 directional coupler for constant phase shift.
• Employed an unpolarized light source to avoid bias errors.
• Implemented a contrast-insensitive signal recovery scheme to eliminate polarization influence.

Main Results:

• Demonstrated rotation rate detection at the quadrature point without phase modulation.
• Achieved bias stability below 4.7 degrees/hour.
• Obtained scale factor accuracy below 0.1% within +/-200 degrees/s.

Conclusions:

• The novel fiber optic gyroscope design effectively overcomes limitations of standard concepts.
• The prototype shows promising performance for high-accuracy rotation sensing.
• This approach offers a robust alternative for inertial navigation systems.