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.
- 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: