What exactly is a fiber optic gyro? What is it used for?
SPRATT: We often joke that FOGs are something along the lines of black magic. In truth, they’re remarkable products that are increasingly in demand for a wide variety of commercial applications ranging from camera stabilization and unmanned autonomous vehicles to defense applications like torpedo guidance and weapon stabilization on vehicles currently in Iraq and Afghanistan. In a nutshell, a fiber optic gyro measures how something is turning or rotating. We fire a laser through a strand of our optical fiber, which is made of glass and only as thick as a human hair. The fiber is wound into a tight coil anywhere from 100 to several hundred meters in length and packed into a housing no bigger than a deck of cards. The light is split so it travels through the fiber coil in opposite directions before reaching an optical detector. Now, if the FOG is completely motionless, the beams of light will exit the coil and reach the detector at exactly the same time. However, if the gyro rotates in o
