![gyroscope system gyroscope system](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/615aeYkhLmL._AC_SX466_.jpg)
![gyroscope system gyroscope system](https://sc02.alicdn.com/kf/HTB1rmxJKXmWBuNjSspdq6zugXXa2/230069304/HTB1rmxJKXmWBuNjSspdq6zugXXa2.jpg)
The gyros in it have a sensitivity* that’s on the order of about 1,000 degrees per hour, meaning that if you spent an entire hour very slowly rotating your phone, the gyro would notice if there were three-ish or more rotations over that time, but if you rotated your phone a bit slower so that it rotated only twice over an hour, the rotation would be too slow for the gyro to detect.
#Gyroscope system plus#
Your phone has three gyroscopes plus three accelerometers that are combined into an inertial measurement unit (IMU) which can detect both acceleration and rotation in all three axes. Researchers at the University of Michigan, led by Khalil Najafi and funded by DARPA, have presented a paper at the 7th IEEE International Symposium on Inertial Sensors & Systems on a new type of of gyroscope called a precision shell integrating (PSI) gyroscope, which the authors say is “10,000 times more accurate but only 10 times more expensive than gyroscopes used in your typical cell phone.” It offers the performance of much larger gyroscopes at one thousandth the cost, meaning that high-precision location awareness, indoor navigation, and long-term autonomy may soon be much more achievable for mobile devices and underground robots.įor some context on just how much better PSI gyro is, it’s important to understand the performance you get from the kind of gyroscopes that you almost certainly have in your cell phone. Unfortunately, gyroscopes that can do a good job of tracking rotation over long periods of time are too big and too expensive for most commercial or consumer-grade systems. The accuracy of these location estimates depends on how accurate the sensors in those IMUs are. Systems that need to track location, like your cell phone, an autonomous car, or a submarine, often use what are called Inertial Measurement Units (a combination of accelerometers and gyroscopes) to estimate position through dead reckoning by tracking changes in acceleration and rotation. There are many situations in which GPS might not be available, such as when you’re inside a building, driving through a tunnel, on a battlefield, in a mine, underwater, or in space. As useful as GPS is, it’s not a system that we can rely on all the time.