Duma Optronics Wins 2024 Innovators Award from Laser Focus World - Silver Honoree - Meet our Total Station Autocollimator
Upgrades to these sensitive measuring devices expand their usability in photonics applications. Innovative enhancements of digital autocollimators enable a wide range of measurements for angular alignment, optical metrology, laser beam profilers, micro-alignment, augmented targets projection, multiwavelength, boresighting, and many more. Originally designed to measure angles, optical alignment, straightness, flatness, and parallelism, using a technique utilized in optical metrology for over a century, a digital autocollimator projects a collimated beam through an objective lens and captures the back-reflection from a mirror using the same objective lens, from which the term “autocollimation” is derived. The reflected image is then focused onto a charge-coupled device (CCD) detector. Through image processing and algorithms, this detector calculates the deviation between the initially projected beam and the incoming angular deviation of the reflected beam.
Modern high-tech industry presents unique challenges due to its intricate nature, integrating various technologies such as lasers, vision systems, computers, electronics, augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) software, LiDAR, and more. New high-tech autocollimators aim to address the additional complexity by providing a comprehensive solution with multiple measurement capabilities integrated into a user-friendly electronic instrument. With this ‘Swiss army-knife’ inspired approach, the autocollimator has re-emerged as a leader in performance characterization for many photonics-related instruments. These applications span from AR/VR goggles and 3D LiDARs to satellite alignment and the inter-alignment of multiple optical elements combined with electronic sensors and lasers. The capabilities of this new instrument are extensive, encompassing optical and laser alignment, illuminated target projection, non-contact mechanical measurements in a plane perpendicular to its line of sight, laser characterization, laser and LiDAR characterization, power measurement, and distribution, among many others.
Due to high-level software package capabilities and its focus motorization feature, the system is applicable to all factory levels starting from scientific measurements, followed by characterization on development, enabling quality assurance measurement and alignment at the production level. Multifunctional autocollimators serve a wide range of applications in optical alignment, laser beam analysis, inter-alignment between optical elements, lasers, and mechanical components, as well as the analysis of complex photonic assemblies.
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