Spatial 3-D nonlinear calibration technique for PSD

Abstract

A 3-D nonlinear calibration technique for Position sensitive detector (PSD) in long distance laser collimating measurement is proposed. An automatic calibration system was developed to measure the nonlinearity of a 2-D PSD in 3-D space. It is mainly composed of a high accurate 2-D motorized translational stage, a high precision distance measuring device, and a computer-based data acquisition and control system. With the aid of the calibration system, the nonlinear characteristic of 2-D PSD is checked in a long collimating distance up to 78 meters. The calibration experiment was carried out for a series of distance, e.g. every 15 meters. The results showed that the nonlinearity of 2-D PSD is different evidently when the PSD element is at different distance from the laser head. One calculating method is defined to evaluate the nonlinear errors. The spatial 3-D mapping relationship between the actual displacements of the incident light and the coordinates of 2-D PSD outputs is established using a multilayer feedforward neural network.