Drive-mode control for an underactuated MEMS vibratory rate gyroscope

It has been shown that the underactuated rate gyroscopes (URGs) hold appealing robust operational performance against the fluctuations of temperature, pressure and structure parameters. In order to further improve the performance of the URGs, the dynamics and the closed-loop control issues of the URGs are investigated in this paper. For a three-DOFs gyroscope with two drive-modes, single sense mode, and single actuator, it is shown that the dynamics of the drive subsystem of the URG can be described as a second-order nonholonomic constraint system, and the dynamics of the drive subsystem of the URG can be transformed into a fourth-order linear system with the Brunovsky’s canonical forms by properly selecting the controlled output. Then a robust controller is presented to stabilize the underactuated system by solving a set of linear matrix inequalities. Additionally, the stability of the presented controller is analyzed and demonstrated by some simulations.