Integrated Optic Rotation Sensor

A small, reliable, and inexpensive rotation sensor will have many industrial as well as military applications such as automobile yaw and pitch control, robot arms guidance, active machinery stabilization, and automatic gun aiming. Optical gyroscopes have potential to meet these requirements. When the sensitivity requirements is relaxed to 1o/sec, which satisfies most industrial applications, the whole instrument can be built on an integrated optics chip (LiNbO3, for example) of the size of a half-dollar coin. This will simplify the gyro assembly and make it very cheap to mass produce. Previous works on the integrated optic gyro aimed at developing high sensitivity gyros for navigation applications; thus, the gyros built were all resonator-type gyros. Our analysis showed that for industrial applications, however, simpler interferometer-type gyros can be built with sufficient sensitivity. Therefore, we propose here to build an inerferometer-type gyro as the low-cost integrated optic rotation sensor for industrial applications. The goal of this Phase I effort is to achieve a design that meets performance requirements and is mass producible at low cost. Anticipated Benefits: Successful development of this small, reliable, and inexpensive rotation sensor will open up a wide range of industrial, as well as military, applications such as automobile yaw and pitch control, robot arms guidance, active machinery stabilization, and automatic gun aiming.