An inexpensive pointing and tracking system using TV cameras and an optical fibre beacon

摘要

An optical pointing and tracking system incorporating opto-electronic components is described. The technique uses fast hardware based methods for tracking a beacon of laser light, where the focused spot is maintained in the centre of the TV camera image. The equipment was originally designed for use with a laser line-of-sight communication system for the control of a mobile vehicle, but can be easily used in many other tracking applications such as navigation, target acquisition and opticalmeasurement systems. The system is designed to operate at short ranges from 1-20 m and has a positional accuracy of 0.1 mm or better at 10 m operating distance.