Global Positioning Systems, Inertial Navigation, and Integration

Chapter 9.1.4: INERTIAL NAVIGATION SYSTEMS: Rotating Coriolis Multisensors

9.1.4 Rotating Coriolis Multisensors

9.1.4.1 Coriolis Effect Gustav Gaspard de Coriolis (1792-1843) published a report in 1835 [39] describing the effects of coordinate rotation on Newton s laws of motion. Bodies with no applied acceleration maintain constant velocity in nonrotating coordinates, but appear to experience additional apparent accelerations in rotating frames. The "Coriolis effect" is an apparent acceleration of the form

where ω is the coordinate rotation rate vector, represents the vector crossproduct, and vrotating is the velocity of the body measured in rotating coordinates.

9.1.4.2 Rotating Coriolis Gyroscope These are gyroscopes that measure the coriolis acceleration on a rotating wheel. An example of such a two-axis gyroscope is illustrated in Fig. 9.9. For sensing rotation, it uses an accelerometer mounted off axis on the rotating member, with its acceleration input axis parallel to the rotation axis of the base. When the entire assembly is rotated about any axis normal to its own rotation axis, the accelerometer mounted on the rotating base senses a sinusoidal coriolis acceleration.

The position x and velocity v of the rotated accelerometer with respect to inertial coordinates will be

where Ωdrive is the drive rotation rate and ρ is the offset distance of the accelerometer from the base rotation axis.

The input axis of the accelerometer is parallel to the rotation axis of the base, so it is insensitive to rotations about the base rotation axis (z axis). However, if this apparatus is rotated with components Ωx, input and Ωy, input orthogonal to the z axis, then the coriolis acceleration of the accelerometer will be the vector cross-product

The rotating z-axis accelerometer will then sense the z-component of coriolis acceleration,

which can be demodulated to recover the phase components ρΩdriveΩx (in phase) and ρΩdriveΩy, input (in quadrature), each of which is proportional to a component of the input rotation rate. Demodulation of the accelerometer output removes the DC bias, so this implementation is insensitive to accelerometer bias errors.

9.1.4.3 Rotating Multisensor Another accelerometer can be mounted on the moving base of the rotating coriolis gyroscope, but with its input axis tangential to its direction of motion. Its outputs can be demodulated in similar fashion to implement a two-axis accelerometer with zero effective bias error. The resulting multisensor is a two-axis gyroscope and two-axis accelerometer.

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