Experimental analysis of beam aiming and pointing system with phased only spatial light modulators

摘要

In this paper, an advanced non-mechanical beam aiming and pointing system is presented. Traditional beam steering is based on the mechanical systems. In the complex and expensive systems, beam jittering and many other problems are major limitations. However, beam steering with optical phased array (OPA) devices can realize agile beam control with random access pointing and high efficiency. Our system is mainly based on phased only spatial light modulators (SLM), which can realize beam steering non-mechanically. Based on the conventional one dimensional beam steering method of SLM, two dimensional beam steering method was presented at first in order to demonstrate the feasibility of the whole system. Then the whole system was tested. Our beam steering system can steer beam to a target which was moving at the speed of 3.8mrad/s within the field of view. The RMS error of the system was 0.0246mrad in one dimension, and 0.139mrad in two dimension respectively. Meanwhile the whole process was recorded by another camera in order to show the results.