Motion tolerant compass and attitude sensor

This project started from a desire to make small low power magnetic compass systems for use in ocean current meters and other similar instruments subject to motions of the package. Previous work had shown that gimballed systems suffer serious dynamic errors when deployed under realistic conditions, other alternatives such as gyro mounted sensors are costly and have other disadvantages such as power consumption, fragility and complexity. A spherical element relative orientation sensor was developed to obtain a period of about 120 seconds. The technology used and the system´s performance is described