Title page for ETD etd-06082000-14320000

Type of Document

Dissertation

Author

Pennington, Timothy L.

URN

etd-06082000-14320000

Title

Miniaturized 3--D Mapping System Using a Fiber Optic Coupler as a Young's Double Pinhole Interferometer

Degree

PhD

Department

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Advisory Committee

Advisor Name	Title
Anbo Wang	Committee Chair
Ahmad Safaai-Jazi	Committee Member
Guy Indebetouw	Committee Member
Richard Claus	Committee Member
Russell May	Committee Member

Keywords

surface profilometry

Date of Defense

2000-06-05

Availability

unrestricted

Abstract

Three--dimensional mapping has many
applications including
robot navigation, medical diagnosis and industrial
inspection. However, many applications remain unfilled
due to the large size and complex nature of typical
3--D mapping systems. The use of fiber optics allows
the miniaturization and simplification of many optical systems.
This research used a fiber optic coupler to
project a fringe pattern onto an object to be profiled. The
two outputs fibers of the
coupler were brought close together to
form the pinholes of a Young's Double Pinhole Interferometer.
This provides the advantages of this simple interferometer
without the disadvantage of power loss by the customary
method of spatially filtering a collimated laser beam with a
pair of pinholes. The shape of the
object is determined by analyzing the fringe pattern. The system
developed has a resolution of 0.1mm and a measurement error less
than 1.5\% of the object's depth.
The use of fiber optics provides many advantages
including: remote location of the laser source (which
also means remote location of heat sources, a critical
requirement for many applications); easy accommodation
of several laser sources, including gas lasers and
high--power, low--cost fiber pigtailed laser diodes;
and variation of source wavelength without disturbing
the pinholes. The principal advantages of this
mapping system over existing methods are its small size,
minimum number of critically aligned components, and remote location
of the laser sources.

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