Electrothermal MEMS parallel plate rotation for real time stereoscopic endoscopic imaging

This paper reports MEMS parallel plate rotation (PPR) with electrothermal actuator for real-time stereoscopic imaging. MEMS PPR allows stereoscopic imaging by generating camera shift effect with displacement in ray of the light. The device was designed opto-mechanically to operate in dynamic mode for stability, large rotation angle. The electrothermal actuation rotates over 25° in dynamic mode under low voltage, generating over 80μm baseline that indicates distance between two cameras and decides depth resolution. Finally stereoscopic images was captured by MEMS PPR and high-speed camera and reconstructed. This method can be widely used in miniaturized stereoscopic imaging system based on single camera.