Semiconductor Laser Radar Techniques For High-precision Position And Velocity Sensing

Semiconductor diode lasers are attractive sources for many laser radar applications because of their small size and light weight. The extremely wide modulation bandwidths available with these devices (˜100 GHz for optical frequency modulation, or 2:10 GHz for intensity modulation) can be used to achieve high measurement precision and/or fast update rate. Possible applications, for example, include "fly-by-light" aircraft flight control and robot control. A typical flight control system might require on the order of 100 linear position sensors with resolutions of 50 μm or less, strokes up to 50 cm, and update rates of greater than 200 sec
^-1
. Our experimental and analytical results indicate that many such sensors can be multiplexed and serviced by a single transceiver using only one semiconductor laser diode.