The current status of the continuous development of gyroscope technology

The navigation technology, which occupies a core position in the consumer market, industrial market, automotive market and even the military market, can accurately locate and guide moving objects by measuring the position parameters of moving objects in real time. There are various ways to implement navigation technology, including inertial navigation, satellite navigation, radio navigation, etc., among which satellite navigation technology is particularly common in daily life. However, it is worth mentioning that the inertial navigation system, especially the high-precision strapdown inertial navigation system, whose core technology is gyroscope, plays a vital role in the field of navigation.

As the core component (gyroscope sensor) of the inertial navigation system, the accuracy of the gyroscope directly determines the performance of the entire inertial navigation system. With the continuous advancement of technology, the current mainstream inertial navigation gyroscope sensors include laser gyroscopes, fiber optic gyroscopes, MEMS gyroscopes, and hemispherical resonant gyroscopes.

As a key component of medium and high precision inertial navigation systems, laser gyroscopes play an indispensable role in high precision and high-end applications. However, their high cost limits their popularity in the civilian field. Subsequently, the rise of fiber optic gyroscopes (FOGs) provided a low-cost alternative to laser gyroscopes. However, with the rise of MEMS technology, MEMS gyroscopes have quickly emerged and have been widely used in many fields such as vehicle navigation and mechanical control.

The birth of the laser gyroscope has triggered a global autonomous navigation revolution. Today, the ring laser gyroscope RLG has become a representative of excellent performance. It uses a ring laser to detect the rotational angular velocity of the external ring through the Sagnac effect, showing high precision and excellent characteristics.

The laser gyroscope is mainly composed of two parts: the control circuit and the sensor body. Among them, the control circuit is called the "brain" of the laser gyroscope. It is not only closely related to performance and reliability, but also the key breakthrough in reducing the cost and improving the usability of the laser gyroscope.

FOG (fiber optic gyroscope) is also based on the Sagnac effect to accurately detect the rotational angular velocity of the external ring. It is based on the optical fiber coil and can achieve different precision measurements by flexibly adjusting the length of the optical fiber or the number of cycles of light in the coil, and has a wide dynamic range.

As a fully solid-state device, the fiber optic gyroscope FOG has a simple structure and no friction parts, so it has a long service life. More importantly, compared with the laser gyroscope, it does not have the problem of locking, and does not need to precisely process the optical path on the quartz block, which greatly reduces the cost and lays a solid foundation for wide application.

However, with the rapid rise of MEMS gyroscopes, fiber optic gyroscopes FOG are also facing new challenges. MEMS gyroscopes are gradually gaining a place in the market with their similar working principles to accelerometers, high error characteristics, high environmental stability and excellent g sensitivity. Its integration capability with a series of discrete MEMS devices has achieved a revolutionary leap in "chip-level navigation".