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Compact Ultra-Stable Gyro for Absolute Reference (COUGAR)

Many future military applications require a revolutionary navigation system for the missions in GPS-denied environments. One of the major technical challenges in navigation without GPS, or its aid, is that position errors caused by gyro drift grow with the cube of time during a mission. Therefore, it is urgent and crucial to develop a highly precise gyro technology that will support required accuracies comparable to GPS-aided inertial navigation systems. The COmpact Ultra-Stable Gyro for Absolute Reference (COUGAR) program will develop a novel fiber optic resonator gyroscope architecture that removes performance barriers of the past and will enable ultra-high precision rotation sensing applications. The COUGAR gyroscope will employ "hollow core," or band gap optical fibers (BGOF), to effectively combine advantages of the state-of-the-art ring laser gyroscopes (RLGs) and fiber optic gyroscopes (IFOGs) in a single approach. Because the BGOF effectively allows optical wave guiding in free space via the bandgap effect, the BGOF will enable multi-turn resonators with an unprecedented signal to noise ratio, while simultaneously maintaining the bias stability commensurate with free space light propagation. With additional progress, particularly in component technologies, the COUGAR gyroscope will be able to attain better than state-of-the-art stability performance, well beyond IFOGs and RLGs, in a compact size.

The COUGAR program goal is to realize the fundamental performance potential of a resonator fiber optic gyroscope (RFOG). Phase I of COUGAR will focus on developing low-loss polarizing hollow-core fibers to prove the feasibility of the novel gyro concept. Phase II will then start to develop other component technologies, e.g., the ultra-stable narrow-lindwidth laser, to fulfill the needs of target gyro performance. Phase III will integrate a working COUGAR gyroscope by employing developed components. Finally, Phase IV will demonstrate a gyro with large improvement of stability and sensitivity (or angle random walk) over state-of-the-art gyroscopes. The COUGAR program will culminate in this absolute-reference-grade optical gyroscope, an integral part of an inertial navigation system, that can yield such a high precision for future military systems. In addition, this new gyroscope technology will produce major changes in the fundamental performance versus size contours to improve GPS-free performance on small platforms by orders of magnitude. The COUGAR technology will not only provide profound improvements in navigation systems of advanced manned and unmanned systems, but also enable revolutionary military applications such as GPS-denied precision missile and precision platform stabilization.