MEMS versus FOG's for Machine Guidance and Control

Fibre Optic Gyroscopes (FOG’s) used to the low-cost equivalent to other technologies, such as Ring Laser Gyroscopes (RLG). FOG’s now find themselves up against microelectromechanical system (MEMS) gyroscopes. MEMS are beginning to take some market share from traditional FOG applications, such as antenna array stabilization, agricultural machine control and general vehicle navigation. This paper compares some high-end MEMS gyroscopes to low-end FOG gyroscopes. The intent is to determine how close the two technologies are to one another for usage in navigation applications. The analysis uses the same navigation software and the same test cases to find out if MEMS are really ready to take the step up to tactical navigation performance levels.