Research on lock-in correction for mechanical dithered ring laser gyro

Abstract

Although a sinusoidal bias method is introduced to avoid working in the death band for a majority of time, the mechanical dithered ring laser gyro (RLG) still encounters information loss when crossing the zero rate point. A novel lock-in error correction method is proposed which can pick up the lost information and remove the random walk error radically. The lost information at the zero rate crossing can be expressed by such parameters as the phase and phase acceleration of a beat frequency signal. These parameters are sampled every time the phase crosses the zero rate point, and two correction trains are formed. Using the minimum variance method, the correction trains are properly scaled to compensate the output of RLG. Experiment shows that even in a bad working condition, this method can achieve satisfactory results.