A miniaturized compact open-loop RFOG with demodulation signal compensation technique to suppress intensity modulation noise

A miniaturized compact open-loop resonator fiber optic gyro (RFOG) prototype with main body size of about 10.4 cm×10.4 cm×5.2 cm is reported, and a demodulation signal compensation technique is proposed, aiming to suppress the drift arising from accompanying intensity modulation induced by semiconductor laser diode (LD). The scheme of how to establish this miniaturized RFOG prototype is specifically stated. The linear relationship between the first-harmonic and second-harmonic demodulated signals respectively for the two counter propagating beams in the resonator is verified by theory and experiment, and based on this relationship, the demodulation signal compensation technique by monitoring the second-harmonic demodulated signal is described in detail. With this compensation technique, the gyro output stability under 1°/s rotation rate is effectively improved from 0.12°/s to 0.03°/s, and especially, an about 0.36°/s peak-to-peak fluctuation due to tuning current reset is significantly suppressed. A long term bias stability of about 4.5°/h in 1 h for such a small-sized RFOG prototype is demonstrated, which is of the same magnitude as that of currently reported large-sized RFOG systems utilizing LD as the laser source as well.