New interpretation of laser gyro drifts

Abstract

Discuss and develop some contents which are relevant to the IEEE Std 647™-2006 in this paper. The IEEE Std only involves Allan variance, and decomposes it into five primary noise terms, in which, however, the noise nature of the so called “rate random walk noise“ and the “rate ramp“ is doubted by the IEEE Std editors. Here we use a mathematical identity to entirely affirm the first query and partially the second query as mentioned above. Besides, we argue that only the classical variance can be used in navigation, not the Allan variance. In order to seek the true nature of all drift terms in the variance, we adopt our original work that represents the noises as damped oscillations, to obtain the power spectral density (PSD) of the noises which is then transformed back into time domain. When the damped time constant is much longer than the sampling interval, the resulting slow variation term may be expanded into three terms: ordinary bias instability, rate random walk, and rate ramp. Therefore, these “noise terms“ are not independent, and they are more of deterministic errors than random noises, and can be explained quantitatively. The resulting fast variation drift may be expanded into two terms. The first term is the same as angle random noise, while the second term adds to the true quantization noise term to form a new combined term called “quantization noise term“. As the result of our research, not only the IEEE Std editors’ suspicions above are answered completely, but a new theory to analyze the laser gyro drifts is also presented, with several supporting examples to explain and verify the theory.