Two-axis gimbal for air-to-air and air-to-ground laser communications

Talmor, Amnon G.; Harding, H G W; Chen, Chien‐Chung

doi:10.1117/12.2218097

Cited by 14 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 2 publications

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“…Approaches to creating high-precision serial gimbals are the utilization of high-precision components, such as actuators, bearings, and encoders, materials, and manufacturing techniques. This can result in high pointing accuracy, but also high manufacturing costs [66][67][68][69]. A common problem in such mechanical apertures is the backlash, which occurs when there are small gaps or clearances between mechanical parts, which lead to a loss of motion or no transfer of force from one part to the next.…”

Section: Pointing Mechanismsmentioning

confidence: 99%

High-Precision Low-Cost Gimballing Platform for Long-Range Railway Obstacle Detection

Assaf

Cornelius

Cadena

et al. 2022

Sensors

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Increasing demand for rail transportation results transportation by rail, resulting in denser and more high-speed usage of the existing railway network, making makes new and more advanced vehicle safety systems necessary. Furthermore, high traveling speeds and the greatlarge weights of trains lead to long braking distances—all of which necessitates Long braking distances, due to high travelling speeds and the massive weight of trains, necessitate a Long-Range Obstacle Detection (LROD) system, capable of detecting humans and other objects more than 1000 m in advance. According to current research, only a few sensor modalities are capable of reaching this far and recording sufficiently accurate enoughdata to distinguish individual objects. The limitation of these sensors, such as a 1D-Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR), is however a very narrow Field of View (FoV), making it necessary to use ahigh-precision means of orienting to target them at possible areas of interest. To close this research gap, this paper presents a novel approach to detecting railway obstacles by developinga high-precision pointing mechanism, for the use in a future novel railway obstacle detection system In this work such a high-precision pointing mechanism is developed, capable of targeting aiming a 1D-LiDAR at humans or objects at the required distance. This approach addresses To address the challenges of a low target pricelimited budget, restricted access to high-precision machinery and equipment as well as unique requirements of our target application., a novel pointing mechanism has been designed and developed. By combining established elements from 3D printers and Computer Numerical Control (CNC) machines with a double-hinged lever system, simple and cheaplow-cost components are capable of precisely orienting an arbitrary sensor platform. The system’s actual pointing accuracy has been evaluated using a controlled, in-door, long-range experiment. The device was able to demonstrate a precision of 6.179 mdeg, which is at the limit of the measurable precision of the designed experiment.

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Section: Pointing Mechanismsmentioning

confidence: 99%

High-Precision Low-Cost Gimballing Platform for Long-Range Railway Obstacle Detection

Assaf

Cornelius

Cadena

et al. 2022

Sensors

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“…However, because of the self-load of the rotating frame, this ATP mechanism is not suitable for the load limitation of small UAVs. However, it has good performance for unmanned vehicles with no weight restrictions [ 108 , 109 , 110 , 111 , 112 , 113 ]. In the OWC system of railway, the ATP mirror-based mechanism is more commonly used, and the primary problem to be solved is the vibration caused by the train during high-speed operation [ 114 , 115 , 116 , 117 , 118 ].…”

Section: Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (Uav) Ground Terminal Optical Wimentioning

confidence: 99%

Frontier Progress of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Optical Wireless Technologies

Ding

Mei

Chih‐Lin

et al. 2020

Sensors

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With the continuous maturity of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) in materials, communications, and other related technologies, the UAV industry has developed rapidly in recent years. In order to cope with the diversified emerging business forms, the explosive growth of the scale of data traffic, number of terminal connections, high reliability, low-latency, and high transmission rate provided by the fifth generation (5G) network will inject new vitality into the development of the UAVs industry. In this paper, optical wireless technology is introduced into the UAV platform, combining theory with practical applications. We explain many research advances and key technologies in the four aspects of “air, space, earth, and sea” to achieve a strong and broadband communication link. This discussion focuses on link modeling, parameter optimization, experimental testing, and the status quo of UAVs in different application scenarios with optical wireless link configurations. At the same time, based on the current situation of UAV optical wireless technology, the technical problems and the research direction in the future are also discussed.

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“…Recently several research efforts have been proposed to design reliable and high-capacity FSO systems, from fixed terrestrial to high-altitude moving platforms (i.e. drones, satellites) [10], [14]- [22]. To increase the system reliability and field-of-regard, the beam tracking is usually split into coarse and fine tracking modules, which corresponds to the alignment process of the incident beam to the antenna telescope lens and the fiber-core or PD apertures, respectively.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To increase the system reliability and field-of-regard, the beam tracking is usually split into coarse and fine tracking modules, which corresponds to the alignment process of the incident beam to the antenna telescope lens and the fiber-core or PD apertures, respectively. For rough tracking, the current systems typically implement 2-axis gimbals and/or larger aperture fast steering mirrors (FSMs), while for fine tracking miniaturized FSMs are commonly used [14], [15]. The FSMs can deflect and steer accurately the incident beam onto the receiving aperture and they are developed using three types of actuators: mechanical, piezoelectric (PZT), and microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) [16].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

New Generation Free-Space Optical Communication Systems With Advanced Optical Beam Stabilizer

Bekkali¹,

Fujita²,

Hattori³

2022

J. Lightwave Technol.

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In this paper, we introduce a novel concept and design of a full-duplex and all-optical FSO transceiver and evaluate its transmission performance in 200 m outdoor environment. Our transceiver enables a reliable fiber-to-fiber FSO link with intelligent lens-based optical-beam-stabilization (OBS) by utilizing miniaturized and cost-effective 3-axis voice-coil motors (VCMs) actuators. The VCM-based moving lens that is widely used in smartphone cameras for auto-focus and opticalimage-stabilization is customized and optimized for our designed transceiver to expand the transmitter and receiver field-of-view, control both the transmitted and incident laser beam alignment, suppress the effects of random beam angle-of-arrival fluctuations induced by the atmospheric turbulence and pointing errors and maintain efficient direct coupling to the fiber core at the receiver. Unlike the 2-axis fast-steering-mirrors, the use of 3-axis VCM lenses can not only maintain the beam alignment, but also control the beam collimation and adjust the difference between the lens focal plane and projection plane for a higher fiber coupling efficiency. Using our developed FSO transceivers, we demonstrate an error-free transmission of the standard signals 10GbE LAN and common public radio interface (LTE-CPRI) over 200 m links. We also performed a continuous 24-hour transmission evaluation in a clear weather day, with only occasional burst errors were recorded and a total 24-hour BER of 3×10 −10 . The obtained results demonstrate the potential of our proposed FSO transceiver to ensure high-capacity communication links and facilitate the adoption of the FSO system as a viable candidate to address the main requirements of B5G/6G networks.

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Two-axis gimbal for air-to-air and air-to-ground laser communications

Cited by 14 publications

References 2 publications

High-Precision Low-Cost Gimballing Platform for Long-Range Railway Obstacle Detection

High-Precision Low-Cost Gimballing Platform for Long-Range Railway Obstacle Detection

Frontier Progress of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Optical Wireless Technologies

New Generation Free-Space Optical Communication Systems With Advanced Optical Beam Stabilizer

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