Navigation with MEMS Gyroscopes: Eliminating Sources of Drift (IDTechEx Sensors USA 2015)

MEMS gyroscopes were intended to be used in navigation or dead reckoning applications, but their use has been primarily limited to non-critical applications. Conventional solutions have been prone to excessive drift, due to error sources such as susceptibility to shock and vibration. Georgia Tech Professor Farrokh Ayazi, CTO of Qualtré, Inc., outlines the technical challenges and new technologies along the path towards eliminating sources of drift — and delivering on the precision required by applications like autonomous driving.

Farrokh Ayazi is the Ken Byers Professor of Microsystems in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA and the Director of the Georgia Tech Center for MEMS and Microsystems Technologies (CMMT). In 2008, Dr. Ayazi co-founded and became the CTO of Qualtré, a spinout company of his research lab that develops bulk acoustic wave (BAW) gyroscopes and inertial sensors for high precision applications and personal navigation systems. The author of more than 200 technical and scientific articles, Dr. Ayazi is a fellow of IEEE and holds 45 issued patents. He was the general chair of the IEEE Micro-Electro-Mechanical-Systems (MEMS) conference in 2014, held in San Francisco, CA.