Long-range, high-precision absolute distance measurement technology based on alternately oscillating optoelectronic oscillator

Abstract

Absolute distance measurement plays an important role in many areas, such as aerospace and scientific research. Traditional measurement methods generally cannot meet requirements for long-range and high-precision at the same time. In this paper, an absolute distance measurement method based on alternately oscillating optoelectronic oscillator is proposed. This method places the distance to be measured in the loop of optoelectronic oscillator and takes advantage of accumulative magnification effect to achieve high accuracy. The measurement and the reference optoelectronic oscillators are established and selected by an optical switch, and a microwave switch is used to choose the high-order or low-order oscillating frequency. The high-order frequency and low-order oscillating frequency of the measurement and reference optoelectronic oscillators are measured in turn by frequency counter to calculate the loop lengths of two optoelectronic oscillators. The low-order frequencies are used to measure the fundamental frequency roughly and the high-order frequencies are used to calculate loop length precisely. Although the mode hopping occurs in the measurement process, it does not affect the loop length calculation by substituting the corresponding oscillating mode number. Note that the loop length measurement moments of two optoelectronic oscillators are different due to the switching order of optical switch and microwave switch. In order to calculate the absolute distance, which is the length difference between two optoelectronic oscillators at the same moment, the measured loop lengths should be averaged.In this way, systematic error accumulation caused by slow drift of environment can be eliminated, and this method does not need to control the length of reference optoelectronic oscillator. Meanwhile, the measurement system is simple. In the experiment, 1 km, 5 km and 8 km fibers are placed in a common part of the measurement and reference optoelectronic oscillators to simulate different long-range distances in space. A high-resolution optical delay line is placed in the measurement optoelectronic oscillator to verify the performance of the measurement system. The experimental results show that the measurement error is 3.5 μm with a 3.5 μm maximum standard deviation of each measurement distance at an emulated round trip distance of 6 km. The relative measurement accuracy reaches 5.8 × 10<sup>－10</sup>. This method provides a feasible idea for solving the technical problems of long-range and high-precision absolute distance measurement.