Development of a diffraction-type optical triangulation sensor

We propose a diffraction-type optical triangulation sensor based on the diffraction theorem and the laser triangulation method. The advantage of the proposed sensor is that it obtains not only the linear displacement of a moving object but also its three angular motion errors. The developed sensor is composed mainly of a laser source, two quadrant detectors, and a reflective diffraction grating. The reflective diffraction grating can reflect the incident laser beam into several diffractive rays, and two quadrant detectors were setup for detecting the position of 0- and +1-order diffraction rays. According to the optical triangulation relationship between the spatial incident angles of a laser beam and the output coordinates of two quadrant detectors, the displacement and the three angular motion errors of a moving object can be obtained simultaneously. (C) 2004 Optical Society of America.