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There was a recent Japan's Top Inventions episode on this: https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/ondemand/video/2091030/ https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/ondema
by omoikane 3y ago
There was a recent Japan's Top Inventions episode on this:
https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/ondemand/video/2091030/ https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/ondemand/video/2091030/
It's very much the same content, but in video form.
Summary: current location of car is tracked using dead reckoning[1], then plotted against maps that were printed on transparencies. Highlights include using the rocket-inspired gas-rate gyro for finding car heading, and figuring out that the car's location tracking was more accurate than the maps they were testing with.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_reckoning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_reckoning
- stefan_ 3y agoWere these "mechanical" gyros somehow vastly superior to the various MEMS contraptions, even the expensive ones? From my experience, the latter ones would dead reckon you to the moon within seconds.
- jfoutz 3y agoI think so, yeah. The space age made precision manufacturing relatively accessible. The U.S. military had a pretty insatiable appetite for these kinds of things for all sorts of stuff. submarines, torpedos, aircraft, drones, and on and on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_navigation_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_navigation_system a quick search didn't find any hard numbers. but, yeah, I'd bet a few dollars they they were (are?) very good.