Vibratory rotation sensor with whole-angle tracking

Abstract

The invention is a vibratory rotation sensor comprising a resonator and a housing to which the resonator is attached and a method for reading out the standing-wave orientation angle utilizing a tracking angle which is maintained equal to the orientation angle on average. The resonator is a rotationally-symmetric thin-walled object that can be made to vibrate in a plurality of standing-wave modes. The method includes applying driving voltages to housing electrodes and determining the orientation of a standing wave by performing operations on the resonator signal that arrives at a single resonator output port from one or more electrodes in close proximity to the housing electrodes. A driving voltage may include either a pair of excitation voltages or a forcing voltage or both. An excitation voltage has essentially no effect on the resonator dynamics but carries information pertaining to the tracking angle and 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 orientation angle, the excitation and forcing voltages are designed to be separable by appropriate operations performed on the resonator signal.