A Novel Closed-Loop Control to Solve Light Source Power Fluctuations in the Fiber-Optic Gyroscope

Abstract

The performance of a gyroscope is directly affected by the fluctuations in the light source power (LSP) in an interferometric fiber-optic gyroscope (IFOG). Therefore, it is important to compensate for fluctuations in the LSP. When the feedback phase generated by the step wave completely cancels the Sagnac phase in real-time, the error signal of the gyroscope is linearly related to the differential signal of the LSP, otherwise, the error signal of the gyroscope is uncertain. Herein, we present two compensation methods to compensate for the error of the gyroscope when the error is uncertain, which are double period modulation (DPM) and triple period modulation (TPM). Compared with the TPM, DPM has better performance, but it increases the requirements for the circuit. TPM has lower requirements for the circuit and is more suitable for small fiber- coil applications. The experimental results show that, when the frequency of the LSP fluctuation is relatively low (1 kHz and 2 kHz), DPM and TPM do not differ significantly in terms of performance; both of them can achieve an improvement of about 95% in bias stability. When the frequency of the LSP fluctuation is relatively high (4 kHz, 8 kHz and 16 kHz), DPM and TPM can achieve about 95% and 88% improvement in bias stability, respectively.