Patent 4735506 Issued on April 5, 1988. Estimated Expiration Date: April 5, 2005. Estimated Expiration Date is calculated based on simple USPTO term provisions. It does not account for terminal disclaimers, term adjustments, failure to pay maintenance fees, or other factors which might affect the term of a patent.
A gyroscope system includes a coherent light source that supplies counter propagating waves to a sensing loop through a pair of directional couplers. The polarizations of the waves are controlled so that they traverse identical optical paths before recombining in one of the couplers to form an interference pattern. Rotation of the sensing loop, a phase modulator and a frequency shifter cause phase changes in the counter propagating waves. A detector monitors the interference pattern of the combined waves and provides a signal to a coherent demodulator that controls the phase modulator. The output of the coherent demodulator is input to a servo-loop circuit that drives a voltage controlled oscillator. The output of the voltage controlled oscillator is an oscillatory signal having a frequency equal to the shift in frequency that the counter propagating waves experience in traversing the frequency shifter. The feedback circuitry adjusts the frequency shift to null the phase difference between the counter propagating waves. The frequency shift is linearly related to the frequency of the signal output from the voltage controlled oscillator. Each cycle of the output of the voltage controlled oscillator coresponds to a fixed angular increment of displacement of the sensing loop. The rotation rate of the sensing loop is a function of the frequency shift and the transit time of the waves through the sensing loop. The gyroscope system determines rotation rates and angular displacements over a wide dynamic range by measuring the frequency and zero crossings of the oscillatory output of the voltage controlled oscillator.
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April 5, 2005. Estimated Expiration Date is calculated based on simple USPTO term provisions. It does not account for terminal disclaimers, term adjustments, failure to pay maintenance fees, or other factors which might affect the term of a patent.
