This Gyroscope is 10,000 Times More Accurate Than Current Ones

This post is also available in: עברית (Hebrew)

Gyroscopes with high sensitivity are exceptionally important for submarines, spacecraft, autonomous cars, indoor robots, and anything else where you need to keep track of where you are without relying on GPS. 

Systems that need to track location often use Inertial Measurement Units – IMUs (a combination of accelerometers and gyroscopes) to estimate position through dead reckoning – calculating one’s current position by using a previously determined position, or fix, and advancing that position based upon known or estimated speeds over elapsed time and course.

The accuracy of these location estimates depends on how accurate the sensors in those IMUs are. Unfortunately, gyroscopes are too big and too expensive for most commercial or consumer-grade systems.

Researchers at the University of Michigan, led by Khalil Najafi and funded by DARPA, have developed a new type of of gyroscope called a precision shell integrating (PSI) gyroscope, which the authors say is “10,000 times more accurate than gyroscopes used in your typical cell phone.” 

It offers the performance of much larger gyroscopes at one-thousandth the cost, meaning that high-precision location awareness, indoor navigation, and long-term autonomy may soon be much more achievable for mobile devices and underground robots, as reported by spectrum.ieee.org.

The new PSI gyro is small, inexpensive, and much more accurate than a conventional cell phone gyro. The secret to this level of accuracy is the heart of the gyro— a resonating structure of ultra-pure metal-coated glass. 

The paper was presented at the 7th IEEE International Symposium on Inertial Sensors & Systems.