Development of high-speed and highly integrated CCD laser range sensor based on FPGA

A miniature and highly integrated laser range sensor based on the triangulation measuring principle is developed for a potential application of relative pose measurement between docking mechanism and non-cooperative target in space. To achieve a highly integrated and miniaturized sensor system design, an idea of Opto-Mechatronics Design is adopted. To achieve high-speed measurement of the sensor, a high-speed data acquisition and syn-processing method is proposed based on Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). This method is elaborated as follows: firstly, build a data acquisition and pre-processing circuit with a ping-pong memory function by using Very-High-Speed Integrated Circuit Hardware Description Language (VHDL), to achieve high-speed CCD data storage and synchronization pre-processing; then, extract the bulk data in effectiveness memory space by the software using the transferring mode of Direct Memory Access (DMA) once the hardware interrupt occurs; finally, process the data by the software to complete the measurement task. Experimental results show that the proposed method is effective and the designed sensor has a good ranging performance. This builds a good foundation for subsequent relative pose measurement.