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Navigation-Grade Integrated Micro Gyroscopes (NGIMG)
Program Manager: Dr. Amit Lal
Overview
The Navigation-Grade Integrated Micro Gyroscope program seeks to attain tiny, low-power, rotation rate sensors capable of achieving performance commensurate with requirements for GPS-denied navigation of small platforms, including individual soldiers, unmanned (micro) air vehicles, unmanned underwater vehicles, and even tiny (e.g., insect-sized) robots. By harnessing the advantages of micro-scale miniaturization, the NGIMG program is expected to yield tiny (if not chip-scale) gyroscopes with navigation-grade performance characteristics, such as (but not limited to):
- Angle random walk (ARW) better than 0.001o/?hr
- Bias drift better than 0.01o/hr.
- Scale factor stability better than 50 ppm.
- Full scale range greater than 500o/s.
- Bandwidth from 1-300 Hz.
- Temperature range from -55oC to 85oC.
- Overall size less than 1 cm3, not including the power source, but including control electronics and any required device packaging.
- Power consumption less than 5 mW.
Vision Statement
NGIMG-enabled devices with characteristics similar to that listed above and achieved via low cost, batch fabrication methods are expected to enable a myriad of strategic capabilities. In particular, the sheer portability of the rotation rate sensors sought by the NGIMG program should introduce a host of new applications and deployment scenarios, including wearable inertial measurement units (IMU's) for dismounted warriors capable of GPS-denied navigation for lengthy periods; small IMU's for unmanned air and underwater vehicles, and for guidance of small, long-range munitions; and tiny IMU's for insect-like robots intended for a variety of future applications, including first warning perimeter sensing. Together with chip-scale atomic clocks (CSAC's) and location-tracking algorithms that harness additional kinetic information (e.g., biokinetic), chip-scale NGIMG's should allow man-portable dead-reckoning devices with unprecedented precision, with and without GPS. By enabling a swelling of applications, as illustrated above, miniaturization via NGIMG technology is expected to generate a need for high volume manufacturing that, together with wafer-level batch fabrication methods enabled by MEMS technology, should substantially lower the cost of miniature navigation systems, and thus, further fuel expansion of the application suite for NGIMG technology.