A new hybrid gyroscope with electrostatic negative stiffness tuning.

A variety of gyroscopes have been extensively studied due to their capability of precision detection of rotation rates and extensive applications in navigation, guidance and motion control. In this work, a new Hybrid Gyroscope (HG) which combines the traditional Dynamically Tuned Gyroscope (DTG) with silicon micromachined technology is investigated. The HG not only has the potentiality of achieving the same high precision as the traditional DTG, but also features a small size and low cost. The theoretical mechanism of the HG with a capacitance transducer and an electrostatic torquer is derived and the influence of the installation errors from the capacitance plate and the disc rotor module is investigated. A new tuning mechanism based on negative stiffness rather than the traditional dynamic tuning is proposed. The experimental results prove that the negative stiffness tuning is practicable and a tuning voltage of as high as 63 V is demonstrated. Due to the decreased installation error, the non-linearity of the scale factor is reduced significantly from 11.78% to 0.64%, as well as the asymmetry from 93.3% to 1.56% in the open loop condition. The rebalancing close-loop control is simulated and achieved experimentally, which proves that the fundamental principle of the HG is feasible.