Mary K. Salit

Fiber optic gyro development at Honeywell

Two major architectures of fiber optic gyroscopes have been under development at Honeywell in recent years. The interferometric fiber optic gyro (IFOG) has been in production and deployment for various high performance space and marine applications. Different designs, offering very low noise, ranging from better than navigation grade to ultra-precise performance have been tested and produced. The resonator fiber optic gyro (RFOG) is also under development, primarily for its attractive potential for civil navigation usage, but also because of its scalability to other performance. New techniques to address optical backscatter and laser frequency noise have been developed and demonstrated. Development of novel, enhanced RFOG architectures using hollow core fiber, silicon optical bench technology, and highly stable multifrequency laser sources are discussed.

Development of compact resonator fiber optic gyroscopes

In this paper we report progress toward a compact resonator fiber optic gyroscope (RFOG) design for commercial navigation applications. Specifically, we report the first use of silicon optical bench (SIOB) technology within the gyro to miniaturize optical component size. A low loss SIOB is used for optical resonator loop closure and a promising initial finesse of 35 is observed. The gyro angle random walk is 0.0029 deg./rt.-hr., and first results show a bias stability of better than 0.1 deg./hr for a sensing coil diameter of two inches. These results represent an encouraging step toward the realization of a practical navigation-grade RFOG for civil navigation usage.