What is the purpose of a gyroscope on a boat and how does it work?
In: Engineering
So I’ll talk about the big boats, aka cruise ships. On a small scale gyroscopes can be used to level something. So think about being at sea in rough waters. Playing pool is going to be super difficult. [Not anymore!](https://youtu.be/N-aE5oszXyQ) The gyroscope keeps the pool table level. Mostly what it’s doing is looking for changes in the table’s orientation and then using motors to compensate.
Now wouldn’t it be better if the boat didn’t rock to begin with? We can apply similar principals to a gyroscope detecting changes in orientation, feeding that into software, and then deploying some sort of compensation to minimize the change. In this case there are two large underwater wings on the back half of the ship. You can see an explanation near the end of [this video](https://youtu.be/A2QfV11XYD8).
If you’re interested in smaller boats, here’s an outfit that makes a much smaller model: https://www.seakeeper.com/technology/ In this case the gyroscope is being moved opposite the tilt of the boat to balance it out.
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