Development and commercialization of open loop fiber gyros at KVH Industries (formerly at Andrew)

The concept of the elliptically cored polarization holding fiber originated during research supported by Andrew Corporation at Imperial College in London, and was first reduced to practice there in 1978 (R.B. Dyott et al, Elect. Lett. vol. 15, no. 13, pp. 380-382, 1979). The work was transferred to Andrew at Orland Park, Illinois in September 1979. The subsequent development in 1982 of the D fiber (R.B. Dyott and P.F. Schrank, Elect. Lett., vol. 18, no. 22, pp. 980-981, 1982), which made the evanescent field of the waveguide accessible, resulted in a fused directional coupler (R.B. Dyott and J. Bello, Elect. Letters, vol. 19, p. 601, 1983) and a fiber polarizer (R.B. Dyott, Optics Letters, vol. 12, p. 287, 1987); the bones of fiber sensors. The first packaged gyro was produced in 1987 as a potential replacement for the mechanical gyros that were being used for antenna stabilization in ships of the US Navy. However it was limited by the very short lifetime of its superluminescent diode light source. This paper summarizes gyro development and production, both at Andrew and at KVH Industries which acquired the gyro product line and production facilities from Andrew in 1997.