| 摘要 |
<p>A non-gimballed angular rate sensor 20 includes four spaced apart vibrating beams defining a pair of outer beams 22, 26 and a pair of inner beams 24, 28. Each outer beam is mechanically coupled to an inner beam by way of an interconnecting member 30, 32. The outer beams are excited to cause them to vibrate in the plane of the beams and 180 degrees out of phase with the inner beams. Since the outer vibrating beams are interconnected to the inner vibrating beams, only the outer vibrating beams are excited while the inner vibrating beams are used for sensing. To compensate for errors resulting from geometric mismatch of the beams an electrode pattern (72, 74, fig 3; 78, 80, fig 4; figs 5, 7, 10) may be formed on a portion of the beams and/or the beams may be driven separately at different amplitudes (fig 11). By dimensionally optimizing the beams, the sinal strength of the sensor will be relatively greater than the signal strength of a gimballed device of a similar size, while not bandwidth limited like a gimballed device.</p> |
