Summary
A primary source of noise and bias-drift in micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) sensors today is the mechanical spring’s anchor to the substrate.
The LeviTAS Disruption Opportunity will perform a fundamental investigation to explore the feasibility of removing the spring anchor and instead levitating and trapping a mass approximately the size of a sugar cube inside a volume approximately the size of a Rubik’s cube.
Traditional approaches to levitated systems have either achieved heavy mass with very small bandwidth, or atom-sized masses with large bandwidth, making such MEMS devices impractical for use as inertial sensors.
LeviTAS aims to break this mass times bandwidth limitation in existing systems by using advances in transducers, materials, and exploring novel architectures to simultaneously achieve heavy mass and high bandwidth in a compact form factor.
The core technology demonstrated in LeviTAS seeks to lay the foundation for providing warfighters long-duration navigation accuracy on handheld devices without having to rely on GPS.