An Antomatic Fiber Alignment System Using Genetic Algorirhms

摘要

In this paper, the authors propose an automatic optical fiber alignment method using genetic algorithms and develop a fiber alignment system to verify its effectiveness. The theory for connecting optical fibers basically differs from the theory for connecting conventional metallic-core wires because the coupling faces must be completely aligned with submicrometer precision. As a result, even manual fiber alignment takes an extremely long time unless an expert with experience and technical proficiency is doing it. To resolve this problem, some attempts have been made to develop automatic fiber alignment systems. However, these systems are not yet practical because the fiber alignment time increases too much as the number of degrees of freedom of the optical fiber coupling faces increases. Therefore, in this paper, the authors developed an automatic fiber alignment system using genetic algorithms, which are efficient search techniques, to implement fiber alignment with many degrees of freedom. Experimental results showed that fiber alignment with five degrees of freedom, which was difficult conventionally, could be completed within a practical interval of approximately 3 minutes.