Design, production, and analysis of a low noise navigation grade fiber optic gyroscope

Inertial Navigation Systems (INS) use an independent navigation technique for tracking the position and direction of an object relative to a known starting point, orientation or velocity. INSs are used in a wide variety of applications such as aircraft, tactical and strategic missiles, spacecraft, submarines and ships. Interferometric fiber-optic gyroscopes (IFOGs) are widely used in military and industrial applications due to their high sensitivity and stability for the INS. Within the scope of this doctoral thesis, extensive research and development studies have been caried out for the improvement of the noise performance of an IFOG. The reduction of the bias errors caused by environmental changes in IFOG systems is one of the important hot topics in this area. As such, in this study, improvements and alternative structures have been proposed for the reduction of the systematic errors in the critical components of the IFOG to eventually obtain a low-noise IFOG configuration that is critical for high sensitivity. In addition to that, an alternative IFOG configuration minimizing the bias errors caused by environmental changes such as temperature and magnetic field, has been proposed.