Effect of quadrature error on the performance of a fully-decoupled MEMS gyroscope

This paper presents experimental data about the sources of the quadrature error motion in a fully-decoupled MEMS gyroscope and demonstrates the extent of performance improvement by cancellation of this error, for the first time in the literature. This work experimentally examines different quadrature sources, determines significance of each source in the overall quadrature error, and concludes that the dominant error source is the imbalances in mechanical springs. Moreover, for the first time, it has been experimentally shown that the bias instability and angle random walk (ARW) of a fully-decoupled MEMS gyroscope improve up to 10 times with quadrature nulling, reaching down to 0.91°/hr and 0.034°/√hr, respectively.