Litton Systems, Inc.

J Scott Darling

Anthony Robert Matthews

Guy Thomas Varty

The invention is a vibratory rotation sensor comprising a resonator and a resonator housing and a method for controlling and reading out the sensor utilizing multiplex electronics. The resonator is a rotationally-symmetric thin-walled object that can be made to vibrate in a plurality of standing-wave modes. One or more electrodes are attached to a surface of the resonator and connect to a single output port The housing has a plurality of attached electrodes in close proximity to the resonator electrodes. The method for controlling and reading out the vibratory rotation sensor includes applying driving voltages to the housing electrodes and determining the parameters of the standing waves by performing operations on the resonator signal that emerges from the resonator output port. A driving voltage may include either an excitation voltage or a forcing voltage or both. An excitation voltage has essentially no effect on the resonator dynamics but carries information pertaining to the standing-wave parameters when it arrives at the resonator output port. A forcing voltage causes forces to be applied to the resonator and thereby affects the dynamics of the resonator and the standing-wave parameters. The driving voltages applied to the housing electrodes are brought together into a single resonator signal as a result of being transmitted through the housing-electrode-resonator-electrode capacitances to the resonator output port. In order to extract the standing-wave parameters, the excitation and forcing voltages are designed to be separable by appropriate operations performed on the resonator signal.

Vibratory rotation sensor with multiplex electronics

Apparatus and methods are disclosed for the time division multiplexing of fiberoptic gyros to reduce the amount of control electronics required. Each of a plurality of gyros is sampled at a rate of n.tau., where .tau. is the gyro optical transit time and n is an integer. The sampled signal is fed to a digital signal processor (DSP) for processing and used to form a rate feedback signal. The rate feedback signal is converted to analog form to drive the phase modulator drive of each gyro. In preferred embodiments the multiplexed sample rate is at least ten times the bandwidth of the gyros. The rate data can be filtered and output by the DSP and the DSP can integrate the rate data to give angle data. The use of precision analog circuits is avoided.

Growing community of inventors

Chatsworth, CA, United States of America

J Scott Darling