A range finder system which is able to measure with high accuracy and at high speed has been developed. The performance is achieved with a special optical system and a pre-processing circuit.
This system has 15 light stripes generated by a series of laser diode and cylindrical lens and the stripes are rotated by a galvanometric motor controlled mirror. This configuration also gives the system flexibility for sampling measurement density and high efficiency of available optical power of light sources.
A pre-processing circuit extracts at video rate two dimensional coordinates of reflected light in TV image. Sub-pixel accuracy is achieved with a determination scheme using center of gravity calculation of the intensity profile.
The system components (the optical unit, the pre-processing circuit, light pattern decoding and three-dimensional coordinates computing) are driven in a pipeline manner, which also contributes to the high speed measurement.