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Laboratory of Space Systems and Optomechanics

Texas A&M University College of Engineering

Inertial Navigation System (GF-INS)

  • LASSO has developed compact optomechanical accelerometers with lower noise floors and larger bandwidth.
  • Why Gyro free INS? Any trajectory consists of translations and rotations. Rotations are always more challenging to deal with. Usually, gyroscopes are implemented for it, but high-grade gyroscopes can be bulky, expensive and energy consuming. Here we obtain all translations and rotations (with both positive and negative, constant and non-constant angular acceleration) with linear accelerometers only, which potentially can result in accurate, compact and cost-effective INS
  • Operation: We need to model the performance of established configurations, using technical parameters of our optomechanical accelerometer.  We developed a universal Quaternion-based algorithm in Matlab for a cube configuration INS with six accelerometers.
  • We worked out several simple examples to test this algorithm for linear and circular trajectories for ex., helix, horizontal pendulum, parabola, bouncing ball.
  • Results: We demonstrated that the algorithm is in a very good agreement with reference trajectories obtained with the same initial parameters but without gyro-free elements.  Also, we confirmed these results with Python.
  • The below videos show, rotations with and without misalignment. This misalignment is introduced at the right bottom corner of the configuration matrix of 6 accelerometers. Two trajectories, reference (red) and gyro-free (blue) are shown. Without misalignment, reference and gyro-free trajectories coincide to the numerical error (~10-14). All these rotations are obtained with LINEAR accelerometers ONLY.
Rotation with misalignment
Rotation without misalignment
  • Future work: If the model predicts significantly improved performance on existing iterations, we will design, fabricate, and test this opto-mechanical GF-INS.

Researchers Involved:

  • Alexander Sinyukov
  • Felipe Guzman

  • Home
  • About Us
  • Research
    • Accelerometer (Inertial Sensor)
    • Optomechanical resonator
    • Interferometer
  • Application
    • Gravitational Wave Detection
    • Space geodesy & Planet Exploration
    • Inertial Navigation System (GF-INS)
  • Group Members
  • Publications
  • Test facilities
  • Employment

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