Fiber optic gyro development at Fibernetics

Fiber optic gyroscope based inertial sensors are being used within increasingly severe environments, enabling unmanned systems to sense and navigate in areas where GPS satellite navigation is unavailable or jammed. A need exists for smaller, lighter, lower power inertial sensors for the most demanding land, sea, air, and space applications. Fibernetics is developing a family of inertial sensor systems based on our closed-loop navigation-grade fiber optic gyroscope (FOG). We are making use of the packaging flexibility of the fiber to create a navigation grade inertial measurement unit (IMU) (3 gyroscopes and 3 accelerometers) that has a volume of 102 cubic inches. We are also planning a gyrocompass and an inertial navigation system (INS) having roughly the same size. In this paper we provide an update on our development progress and describe our modulation scheme for the Sagnac interferometers. We also present a novel multiplexed design that efficiently delivers source light to each of the three detectors. In our future development section we discuss our work to improve FOG performance per unit volume, specifically detailing our focus in utilizing a multicore optical fiber.