Optical kinematics of dual mirror laser rangefinders

Abstract

The topic of kinematics of laser rangefinders has received little attention in the robotics literature, even though such sensors have been the perception sensors of choice on commercial AGVs, field robots, and aerial robots for some time. Unlike the physical mechanisms employed in manipulators and mobile robots, the basic operation for bending the optical path of the transmit and receive beams of a laser rangefinder is often a reflection about a mirror, and this operation cannot be modeled naturally as a rotation. In recognition of the uniqueness of optical reflection mechanisms, this paper presents a formulation for modeling 2 axis scanning laser rangefinders based on a matrix reflection operator.