With the rapid development of modern physics, atomic gyroscopes have been demonstrated in recent years. There are two types of atomic gyroscope. The Atomic Interferometer Gyroscope (AIG), which utilizes the atomic interferometer to sense rotation, is an ultra-high precision gyroscope; and the Atomic Spin Gyroscope (ASG), which utilizes atomic spin to sense rotation, features high precision, compact size and the possibility to make a chip-scale one. Recent developments in the atomic gyroscope field have created new ways to obtain high precision gyroscopes which were previously unavailable with mechanical or optical gyroscopes, but there are still lots of problems that need to be overcome to meet the requirements of inertial navigation systems. This paper reviews the basic principles of AIG and ASG, introduces the recent progress in this area, focusing on discussing their technical difficulties for inertial navigation applications, and suggests methods for developing high performance atomic gyroscopes in the near future.

Atomic spin gyroscope (ASG) based on comagnetometer is a high sensitive and compact gyroscope for future inertial navigation applications. The start-up time was several hours of the demonstrated ASGs based on ³He-K or ²¹Ne-Rb-K comagnetometer, and only a few inertial navigation applications allow such a long time for preparation. We report the demonstration of an ASG based on ¹²⁹Xe-Cs comagnetometer, which decreases the start-up time to 10 minutes and decreases the operation temperature by 40% as well. By operating this ASG in spin exchange relaxation free regime, a sensitivity of 7×10⁻⁵ °/(s Hz^1/2) was achieved.