Vibratory gyro skewed pick-off and driver geometry

This report is based on recent patent applications by Watson Industries, which are available to the industry through licensing. Essentially, Watson Industries has developed several novel new means of applying and extracting signals for vibratory gyros. The method involves using a slight skew in alignment for pickoffs and/or drivers to control the drive and sensing vectors to electrically optimize gyro performance. The main example presented is based on the ceramic cup vibrating structure gyro, but these same principles may apply to almost all other vibrating structure gyro mechanisms. The improved pickoff design allows both drive sensing and rate sensing to be produced from the same set of node pickoffs. Additionally, the associated circuitry allows independent electrical adjustment of the sense axis alignment and isolation of the drive-sensing signal from the rate-sensing signal. The improved driver design also allows electrical adjustment of the drive vector. The design additionally provides a means of applying torque drive and quadrature corrections to the gyro on the same drivers as the operational drive. Again all of this is done with minimal connections to the gyro mechanism while preserving symmetry of the drivers.