When using a gyro chip to measure angular velocity, does it matter whether it is located at the center of rotation?
I've seen it mentioned online without much explanation that it should be placed at the center, but in my introductory physics courses I learned that the angular velocity is the same at every point on a rigid body. Wikipedia seems to confirm this in the last section of Angular velocity, but I'm not sure I'm interpreting it correctly.
I expect that there is normally some non-ideal coupling of the acceleration terms into the gyro measurement — is that the main problem?
Is there something obvious that I am missing?
Best Answer
I just checked this by "thinking" about that and noticed, that for an ideal rigid body (!) it doesn't matter where you place it.
I just imagined that like this:
Theory vs. Practical "Rigid Body":
You possibly want to measure the orientation/position of something (e.g. wings of a plane or the "body" of quad copter). So the gyro should be fixed to exactly that.
PS: Thank's for pointing me at this issue. This helps me a lot (need those sensors for research).