Back in the early 1980's when attending college I worked on a single
axis multi-mode fiber optic
rate gyro project that used GRIN fiber. Back then a military three axis
unit based on single mode
fiber was alleged to be a little larger than a one inch cube and cost
slightly less than a million dollars.
We used a three inch spool for the fiber and put everything in a six
inch cube for a housing.
The NASA contract was part of the NASP program.
The company that we worked with wanted to produce a product for the
commercial "private
pilot" aviation market. I will have to ask what happened...
I think the patent issue may have had something to do with it since the
company had a
relationship with Litton.
Jim Cotton
n8qoh
[email protected] wrote:
Does anyone know how laser gyroscopes are developing?
Laser gyroscopes - as in Ring Laser Gyroscopes or as in Fiber Optic
Gyroscopes?
RLGs are a standard commercial product. Several years back I was
walking through the Honeywell plant in St Paul, MN, and they had a
display case of at least a dozen RLGs that they've made over the past
few decades.
Commercial?
US RLGs are all ITAR.
"All types of gyros usable in the systems in Item 1, with a rated drift
rate stability of less than 0.5 degree (1 sigma or rms) per hour"
http://www.fas.org/spp/starwars/offdocs/itar/p121.htm
Honeywell has about 2 different RLGs. Only one (gg1320) of which you can
make a north sensing out of. Litton (now NGC) used to do RLGs (their "zero
lock gyros") but I think they were on the loosing side of a patent war
with Honeywell.
French Sagem do some for high end military systems. Have I missed a RLG
manufacturer? Almost as few vendors as in the Cesium oscillator market...
No new RLG sensors has been announced during the last decade or two.
--
Björn
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