Andrei Shkel revolutionized the production of gyroscopes by miniaturizing them and using a glassblowing technology he observed from glass artists in Barcelona, Spain. Step into one of the most high precision gyroscope labs in the world and learn about how they're helping firefighters in this episode.
Transcript:
[sound of wire bonder]
[sci fi music]
ELENA WOLGAMOT: This is the wire bonder. This allows us to measure the signals that are coming from the gyroscope, so we can detect the rotation that the sensor is experiencing.
NATALIE TSO, HOST: That's Ph.D. student Elena Wolgamot describing a machine in one of the world's most high precision gyroscope labs at UC Irvine. What's a gyroscope? They’re key devices that measure orientation and positioning.
They're used in phones, ships, planes and spacecraft to help us stay on course. Most look like a spinning top, but the ones in Andrei Shkel's lab look like wine glasses. Andrei Shkel is a UCI Chancellor's professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering. In 2009, he led a $200 million U.S. Department of Defense national program to miniaturize gyroscopes. He was inspired to make them smaller and more accessible after he saw $1 million gyroscope used in space satellites.
ANDREI SHKEL: The highest performance gyroscope ever built. This device is made out of fused quartz, very special device, very expensive, used only on space satellites. In space, there is no GPS and you don't know where you are. So you need some reference. You can use stars, but sometimes stars are not visible. So gyroscopes and accelerometers are really the only sensors that can tell you where you are, your orientation, your position.
TSO: It takes three months to make and manually assemble the 96 parts in that hemispheric resonance gyroscope. Shkel revolutionized the production of gyroscopes after an artist in Barcelona, Spain, inspired him.
SHKEL: In Barcelona, there is a replica of Spanish Village and where they demonstrate different crafts and this is where I saw this glassblower creating these three dimensional shapes and vases and spheres.
TSO: That gave him an idea.
SHKEL: Maybe something like this can be done on a micro scale and on a very small scale. I went back and asked one of my students to try it out. Didn't work, didn't work. And then suddenly we were able to make these three dimensional structures, spheres.
TSO: Like a glassblower, Shkel uses a furnace of 1,700 degrees Celsius to form glass into wine glass-shaped structures.
Researchers line the inside of the structures with a thin layer of metal. Then they bond wire electrodes to the shell to make two millimeter-wide gyroscopes.
WOLGAMOT: There's about 15 to 20 steps in the whole process from start to finish, and it's a lot of testing the device, doing another step, testing, seeing if it's better and we're constantly improving our process and seeing how our different steps and making the devices are affecting their performance.
[sound of vacuum pump]
This is a vacuum pump, so this pulls all of the air out of a chamber. So that way we can test the gyroscopes in a space that has no air. The gyroscopes need to be tested in a space that doesn't have air, because they move so fast and the air slows them down. So it would be like if we were trying to run through honey. These gyroscopes are moving and vibrating so fast it's causing that much resistance for them. So we use this vacuum pump to pull all of the air out of the chamber where we test so then it can move freely and fast and we can sense small rotations.
TSO: Shkel’s mini-gyroscopes have been used for autonomous driving, drone navigation, phones and more. Another exciting project they're working on is called NeverLost. It’s for firefighters.
SHKEL: When they are on a mission trying to fight fire, they're in a very extreme environment. Environment is so complicated. It's hard. It's almost zero visibility and they don't really have a way to know where people are while they're on a mission. And they said, well, one of the important problem is to develop ability to locate where each first responder is at any point in time. And of course, they’re operating in an environment where it is likely there is no GPS. So what we proposed is to use inertial sensors technology and integrate these inertial sensors in the sole of a shoe.
TSO: Graduate student Eudald Rafart explains what they've achieved so far.
EUDALD RAFART: We are able to track firefighters within one meter, walking around 20 minutes. Also, part of my research has been developing this Google Maps. It's not just knowing where you are, also it comes with the ability of say, I want to go here inside the building.
TSO: Shkel’s NeverLost project won the Innovator Award last year at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. His ultimate dream is to help restore the vestibular system in the inner ear for the elderly, to help them prevent falls.
Those are the innovations happening at Andrei Shkel’s Lab at UC Irvine. The Lab Beat is brought to you by the UC Irvine Samueli School of Engineering and I’m Natalie Tso.
(Season 2, Episode 2)
