Recent progress in advanced autonomous driving techniques, such as level 5 or level 4, requires precise dead reckoning in order to compensate main positioning systems such as GNSS, visual SLAMs or LIDARs. This kind of precise dead reckoning is established by using a gyroscope of 0.1 deg/ hr. class. Currently, gyroscopes that satisfy this accuracy include interferometric fiber optic gyros (i-FOGs) and Ring Laser Gyros (RLGs) and their price range is more than $10,000 per axis. So it is strongly required to reduce the price of gyroscopes with equivalent accuracy for practical application and commercialization of autonomous driving. To maintain accuracy of the i-FOG, we should use precisely aligned quadrupole optical fiber coil and modulation element parts, called IOC (Integrated Optical Circuit). When considering fabrication cost of the i-FOG, production costs of these two important components have substantial ratio in total production cost. Especially the former one generally thought to be difficult to reduce because it depends upon human handwork to achieve quadrupole winding arrangement and precise alignment of optical fiber on the coil bobbin simultaneously. To solve this difficulty, we have developed automatic optical fiber winding machine which can execute automatic quadrupole winding with fine alignment of optical fiber by adopting double-flyer winding mechanism. This mechanism allows us to avoid extra and time-consuming hand work for changing the optical fiber source from left to right and right to left for each layer of the fiber coil. This has reduced the man-time to 1/5. By combination of this technique and our fabrication process of IOCs, we have acquired the potential to reduce fabrication cost of i-FOGs.
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