Rice-Sized Gyroscope

Oct-27-18 A tiny optical gyroscope the size of a grain of rice could find its way into drones and spacecraft.

Gyroscopes are an important part of today’s technology, though as the demand for smaller devices grows, the gyroscope design has had to keep pace. To compensate for the loss of accuracy that comes with miniaturizing devices, the team from Caltech improved their gyroscope’s performance using a new technique called “reciprocal sensitivity enhancement.” This helps eliminate distracting reciprocal noise while improving the signal-to-noise ratio captured using the common Sagnac effect.

The result is a gyroscope five hundred times smaller than its counterparts while still able to detect phase shifts thirty times smaller than other gyroscopes are able.

More Info about this Invention:

[CO.UK]
[CALTECH.EDU]

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