In this paper, in order to improve the sensitivity of tactile sensor, we proposed and demonstrated a fiber in-line Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) sensor for the measurement of grasp force. The sensor was fabricated by splicing a section of few-mode fiber (FMF) between two single mode fibers (SMFs). The simulation using Rsoft software shows that the sensor has the best performance with the FMF length is 10mm and the core offset is 5um. The mechanical strength of the sensor is improved by using heat shrink tube at the point of optical fiber fusion splicing. The MZI sensor is embedded in the gripper and the force calibration is carried out by using the piezoresistive sensor. The experiment shows that the sensitivity of the sensor is about 6nm/N. The sensor has many advantages including simple fabrication, low cost, and high sensitivity, demonstrating its great application potential in the fields of Human Machine Interface.
Robotic grippers combined with visual-touch sensor fusion have been widely used in the manufacturing industry. However, due to limited control of the force applied to the mechanical gripper, it is hard to achieve stable object grasping. Therefore, to control the force of gripping objects, we propose a robotic rotary gripper fused with light detection and ranging (LiDAR)-tactile. We use LiDAR to obtain distance information and fiber Bragg grating as the tactile sensor for force feedback. In order to ensure the low-loss transmission of the optical signal in the rotation process, the fiber optic rotary joint is employed and assembled into the system. Finally, the experimental results show that our proposed system can achieve a stable grasp of objects with different shapes by precisely controlling the force, which can meet the demands for precise robotic grasping and fast manipulation.
The eigenmode expansion method is applied to discretize the stepped shine grating into a binary shine grating. Various strategies that increase the directionality of the coupling efficiency have been optimized and replicated using this binary shining grating. We discussed and analyzed the impact of distributed Bragg reflectors, slits, and metal reflectors on the coupling efficiency of grating couplers. A metal reflector and slit were included in the design of a binary shine grating coupler. The coupling efficiency from the fiber to the waveguide of vertically incident electrically polarized light is 75.07% at 1600 nm. A 3 dB bandwidth of 77 nm from 1554 to 1631 nm is obtained.
Cardiovascular disease is a major risk to human health, which needs long-term monitoring for prevention and early diagnosis. Optical sensors present the advantage of immunity to electromagnetic field and high sensitivity, and have been growing in a variety of emerging medical applications to monitor human cardiac parameters. Most of the current optical sensors can only measure limited cardiovascular information such as the heart rate, therefore, the optics-based approach for cardiac electrophysiology has attracted the attention of more researchers. In this paper, we developed a method to evaluate the availability of our proposed anti-EMI optical sensor. The sensitivity of optical sensor based on electro-optic modulation can achieve 266.4μW/V and detect the electrocardiogram (ECG) by attached to the chest and edge of clavicle. A series of ECG signals over 1 hour were analyzed using proposed method, which is driven by the optimization of R-peak location, Lorenz plot and statistical correlation. ECG monitoring results of the optical sensors are in accordance with a standard clinical device (SOMNOtouch™ RESP) among different subjects. Moreover, both the sensors are tested in daily electromagnetic conditions, and it causes some obvious signal artifacts to the SOMNO system, but almost no effect on the optical sensors during the long-term test. We provide further grounds for such clinical applications by demonstrating, for the first time to our knowledge, optics-based device used in long-term ECG monitoring, an essential tool in modern cardiac monitoring applications.
The Optical Parametric Oscillator (OPO) is a simple and effective method to generate desirable and specific wavelength. The OPO laser is small, portable and has high efficiency, low threshold and can be operated at room temperature. In this paper, we report an electrically controlled tunable optical parametric oscillator operating from wavelength of 3.0 to 6.7 μm. The nanosecond OPO is based on BaGa4Se7 (BGSe) crystal and pumped by a 10 ns 1.064 μm electro-optic Q-switched Nd:YAG laser. The output mid infrared idler wave can be tuned from 3.0 μm to 6.7 μ with pulse energy as high as 2.55 mJ at 3.8 μm and can be even increased with more pump power. The output idler wavelength can be tuned by turning the rotation angle of the crystal, which is controlled by an electronic motor. The motorized continuous rotation stage is compact and highly precise with minimum rotation step of 0.0025°. This enables the fine tuning of the phase-matching angel and the resulting output wavelength. The central idler wavelength is 4.6 μm (rotation angle is 0°).
White light interferometry is used to measure distributed polarization coupling in high-birefringence polarization-maintaining fibers (PMFs). When there are multiple intrinsic coupling points (CPs), multiple-order ghost CPs will produce. The quantity of multiple-order coupling modes can be calculated recursively. A graphical method is proposed to distinguish the multiple-order ghost CPs from intrinsic CPs. Overlapping of CPs is affected by the positions of disturbance points. Experiments on two and three disturbance points imposed on PMFs are performed. Experimental results show the positions of multiple-order CPs are agree well with graphical analysis. Additionally, the graphical method can be used to analyze other polarization-sensitive optical devices.
We designed an annular blazed grating to achieve maximum optical power in the +1st transmitted order at a fixed diffraction angle. We performed theoretical analysis and simulations on the designed grating, where the incident beam (wavelength: 1550 nm) was perpendicular to the grating surface. The diffraction efficiency in the +1st transmitted order was dependent on the blaze angle (or modulation depth) and period for a refractive index of 1.49. The diffraction efficiency in the +1st transmitted order was maximum (85.94%) at a modulation depth and period of 2.18 μm and 3.96 μm, respectively, and the corresponding diffraction angle was 45.3°.
The light scattering properties of a transparent spheroidal particle is investigated using defocused interferometric particle imaging. Based on optical transfer matrix theory, the out-of-focus images are simulated using Matlab. We found that the angular variation of a spheroidal particle exhibits isometric with angular variation of the speckle of out-of-focus image. The out-of-focus images of transparent spheroidal particles under different angle of rotation are experimentally acquired using interferometric particle imaging system. The experimental results showed agreement with the simulation results. Thus, we propose a method for obtaining the angular variation of a spheroidal particle using out-of-focus image.
In this paper, we proposed a distributed stress sensor based on white light interferometer. The measurement including two steps: firstly, the moveable mirror of Michelson interferometer scans to detect the interferogram, and the position of dynamic stress can be obtained from the interferogram. Secondly, the moveable mirror of Michelson interferometer adjusted to compensate the optical path difference generated in the polarization maintaining fiber, and the photodiode detect the interference intensity. By applying wavelet transform to the detect signal, the frequency of dynamic stress can be demodulate. In our experiments, the measurement errors for 100 Hz and 1 kHz sinusoidal stress are 0.26 Hz and 0.3 Hz, respectively. And 20 Hz - 60 Hz chirp signal is also measured successfully. In the end, the harmonics in the time frequency distribution image and the factors resulting in the measurement error are discussed in detail.
We propose an effective image denoising filter that combines an improved spin filter (ISF) and wave atoms thresholding (WA) to remove the noise of fringe patterns in electronic speckle shearing pattern interferometry. The WA is first employed to denoise the fringe to save the processing time, and then the ISF is further used to remove noise of the denoised image using WA to obtain a better denoising performance. The performance of our proposed approach is evaluated by using both numerically simulated and experimental fringes. At the same time, three figures of merit for denoised fringes are also calculated to quantify the performance of the combined denoising filter. The denoised results produced by ISF, WA, and bilateral filtering are compared. The comparisons show that our proposed method can effectively remove noise and an improvement of 12 s in processing time and 0.3 in speckle index value is obtained with respect to ISF.
A novel curved compound eye imaging system is put forward in this paper. Non-uniform hexagonal lens array is
arranged on the inner surface of a plano-concave substrate. Based on the geometrical optics, the parameters of each
microlens are set according to the position of the lens, and even orders of aspheric lens are used to correct some primary aberrations. Optical parameters of this configuration are entered into numerical ray-tracing simulations (ZEMAX). The result shows that the new curved compound eye can enlarge the field of view (FOV) approximately 50% compared to the lateral compound eye, and the FOV can be up to 150°. The principles and functions of all parts of system are described in detail. At last, the feasibility of ultra-precision machining is studied in this paper.
Low-frequency wavelength modulation is introduced to increase sensitivity of intra-cavity absorption gas sensor
(ICAGS) system. ICAGS system including erbium-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA), pump laser, tunable fiber Fabry-Perot
(F-P) optical filter and gas cell is set up. Using virtual instrument technique, modulation function is generated by
LabVIEW software and outputted through the AO ports of data acquisition card to tune the driving voltage of optical
filter. The AI ports collect the laser power signals in a synchronous mode. Harmonic spectra can be computed by
adopting the method of the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT). According to the characteristics of different order
harmonic, even harmonics and odd harmonics are analyzed respectively. Here, second harmonic is used to determine the
spectral intensity, and third harmonic is mainly used to locate the position of spectral lines. With optimum 10 Hz
frequency modulation, acetylene absorption experiments were carried out. The pump current of EDFA is 60 mA and the
acetylene concentration in the gas cell is 1%. After spectra extraction, in the 1526 nm to 1537 nm wavelength range, 17
absorption lines of acetylene were achieved. The results indicated that the error of wavelength position is less than 0.1
nm and the minimum detection limit of acetylene is about 120x10-6. It is possible to realize the recognition of measured
gas type and multi-component gas detection for ICAGS system.
A tunable intracavity fiber laser has been widely used for gas sensing. In order to design a better performance sensor by use of this tunable intracavity fiber laser, the influence factors, including output power such as pump power, intracavity loss, output splitting ratio, and emission wavelength, are investigated based on a theoretical model using the propagation equation. The tunable intracavity fiber laser is set up, and the effects of pump power, intracavity loss, output splitting ratio, and emission wavelength are measured. The experimental results indicate that the theoretical analysis is in good agreement with the experimental measurements; in the process of designing the sensor, the intracavity loss and splitting ratio should be given more attention.
Detection of pollution gas is important in environmental and pollution monitoring, which can be used widely in mining
and petrochemical industry. Fiber optical spectrum absorption (FOSA) at near-IR wavelength is widely used in gas
detection due to its essential advantages. It has attracted considerable attention, and there are several types and methods
in FOSA. Wavelength modulation technique (WMT) is one of them, which will improve the gas detection sensitivity
dramatically. This technique can be realized by detecting the intensity of the second-harmonic component signal.
Intra-cavity laser spectroscopy (ICLS) is another alternative technique for high sensitivity absorption measurement. With
an absorber directly placed within the laser cavity, a short absorption cell can be transformed into a high sensitivity
system. But the practical sensitivity is obviously less than the theoretical value. The authors did some works in these
fields and have obtained some remarkable progress. With broad reflectors instead of FBG as mirror of the cavity and
wavelength sweep technique (WST), several absorption spectra of detected gas can be collected. And the detection
sensitivity can be enhanced sharply by averaging the results of each spectrum, with acetylene sensitivity less than
100 ppm . When ICLS is used combined with WST and WMT, the detection sensitivity of acetylene can be enhanced
further. The sensitivity is less than 75 ppm. By using FBGs as wavelength references, the absorption wavelength of the
detected gas is obtained, which can be used to realize gas recognition. The system is capable of accessing into fiber
intelligent sensing network.
Photonic crystal fibers (PCFs) as a special type of optical fibers have a wide range of applications
including fiber lasers, amplifiers, telecom components, fiber-optic sensors of various kinds and
quantum optics. Chromatic dispersion (CD), which is one of the PCFs' most important parameters,
plays key roles in its performance and the device which is made of it. Due to the diversity of PCFs'
structure and study of its relevant devices, the precision measurement of PCFs' CD is particularly
important. Based on the analysis of CD measurement method, a set of experimental system for
measuring PCFs' CD value was developed by using white-light Michelson interferometry. The
maximum CD is 1000ps/nm using this system. The algorithms of extracting the CD from the
interference spectra were studied. Experiments were carried out to measure the PCFs' CD value based
on the CD measurement system. The experimental results show that: the CD value of PCF is
-25.8634 ps/(nm • km) at 1300nm wavelength.
In this paper, an electronic speckle-shearing pattern interferometer with pulsed laser and pulse frequency controller
is fabricated. The principle of measuring the vibration in the object using electronic stroboscopic speckle--shearing
pattern interferometer is analyzed. Using a metal plate, the edge of which is clamped, as an experimental specimen,
the shear interferogram are obtained under two experimental frequencies, 100 Hz and 200 Hz. At the same time, the
vibration of this metal plate under the same experimental conditions is measured using the time-average method in
order to test the performance of this electronic stroboscopic speckle-shearing pattern interferometer. The result
indicated that the fringe of shear interferogram become dense with the experimental frequency increasing. Compared
the fringe pattern obtained by the stroboscopic method with the fringe obtained by the time-average method, the
shearing interferogram of stroboscopic method is clearer than the time-average method. In addition, both the
time-average method and stroboscopic method are suited for qualitative analysis for the vibration of the object. More
over, the stroboscopic method is well adapted to quantitative vibration analysis.
In the optical rotary joints, the Dove Prism is employed to rotate an image about the optical axis and compensate optical
path of optical signals so that the optical signals can be transferred across the rotating interface. However, manufacturing
errors and assembling errors of Dove Prism will affect the coupling efficiency of Dove Prism. In this paper, the analytical
expressions for errors of the rotating coupling efficiency are presented when the prism is manufactured with errors in its
base angle and pyramidal angle. The analytical result showed that the coupling losses that arise from manufacturing errors would increase as the base angles deviate from the traditional value of 45° and the pyramidal angle increase. At the same time, the influence of assembling errors on coupling efficiency is also analyzed using the method of light ray tracing. The assembling errors of Dove Prism included angular tilt misalignment, height misalignment, and inclining misalignment. The results indicated that these misalignments cause the coupling efficiency of Dove Prism decreased. The coupling efficiency is more sensitive to the height misalignment and angular tilt misalignment than the inclining misalignment.
Distributed stress sensor with a scanning Michelson white light interferometer can be used to detect stress distribution
and its value by analyzing polarization mode coupling caused by stress field in PMFs (polarization maintaining fibers).
In the measurement of polarization coupling, the birefringence in sensing fiber is usually considered to be
wavelength-independent. The spatial resolution of the distributed stress sensor is invariable, when the optical source
spectrum is given. In practical measurement, however, the birefringence in PMF is related with optical wavelength, the
birefringence dispersion exists in PMF. Due to the birefringence dispersion, the spatial resolution of the distributed stress
sensor descends obviously with the fiber length increasing. In this paper, the influence of external force position and
optical source spectrum on spatial resolution in the distributed stress sensor is analyzed, while the birefringence
dispersion is considered.
One of the key issues in establishing an optical fiber sensing system based on fiber Bragg gratings (FBGs) is the
selection of a suitable wavelength shift detection scheme in terms of the performance it offers. By use of a compact
Fabry-Perot (F-P) tunable filter, the Bragg wavelength variation can be detected with a relatively high speed and
satisfying resolution. In this paper, a dynamic strain sensing system based on F-P tunable filter is described, and the F-P
tunable filter is demonstrated to have a significant impact on the system. The relationship between the collected spectrum
of grating and the 3-dB bandwidth of the F-P tunable filter is discussed. The optimum 3-dB bandwidth of the F-P tunable
filter for most FBGs is obtained. It is exhibited in this paper that the demodulation precision and sensitivity of the strain
sensing system is influenced by the nonlinearity between the transmission wavelength of the F-P tunable filter and the
drive voltage. The drive voltage is rectified using interpolation algorithm. The experimental results illustrate that the
average error and the maximum error of the transmission wavelength are decreased by 96.4% and 80.9% respectively.
The strain sensitivity of the optimized system is below
3με. The error between the practical strain value demodulated
by the system and theoretical value is below 5%.
A white light interferometer is designed to measure the distributed polarization coupling (DPC) in
polarization-maintaining fiber (PMF). By using a Michelson interferometer to compensate the optical path difference
induced by the modal birefringence of PMF, both the coupling strength and position of the coupling point can be
acquired. The two reflective mirrors on the fixed and scanning arms should be vertical to each other. But in practice, the
movable reflective mirror can't be vertically aligned exactly to the fixed mirror, which would lead to angle misalignment.
The angle misalignment would induce the variance of the optical path difference (OPD), which would reduce the fringe
visibility. Finally, the angle error would lead to a decrease on the signal noise ratio (SNR) and miscalculation of the
polarization coupling intensity. The angle misalignment and diameter of the incident light beam both have an effect on
the fringe visibility. The simulation results show that the requirement of angle error becomes stricter with the increasing
of the light beam diameter. To decrease the angle misalignment, the two plane reflective mirrors should be replaced with
the corner cube prisms. A revised coupling strength calculation equation was proposed to minimize the influence of angle
misalignment.
We present a compact short pulses source, in which the pulses generated by large-signal directly modulated laser diode
are phase-modulated, and it can compress the pulse from 30ps to 5.3ps with 184fs timing jitter.
We experimentally demonstrate a 4×10-Gb/s optical multicast scheme using a semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA)
and a single optical source, which produce a 10-GHz multi-wavelength pulse-trains used as the probe light of the SOA.
The multicast principle is based on the multi-wavelength conversion (MWC) by means of the interaction of both cross
gain modulation (XGM) and transient cross phase modulation (T-XPM) of the SOA. Because of the nonlinear
amplification of SOA, the 4 output copies are regenerated with respect to the input degraded signal. This scheme is very
simple and allows photonic integration.
KEYWORDS: Dispersion, Microwave radiation, Telecommunications, Signal processing, Digital signal processing, Signal detection, Sensors, Transmitters, Fiber optic communications, Optical amplifiers
A feasible and cost-effective online chromatic dispersion (CD) monitoring scheme for high speed optical communication system is demonstrated in this paper. Based on the formerly verified theoretical model, the output electrical power of a specific frequency band is tested to reflect the residual chromatic dispersion online. Thus the microwave devices are selected to form the electrical power detecting circuit, which consists of a PIN photodiode, a microwave power filter and a power detector in tandem. In the experiments, frequency band center were chosen at 5 GHz for the 10 Gbit/s system and 12 GHz for the 40 Gbit/s system. Then the output voltage of the detector was processed and converted to digital signal and the signal was processed to obtain the amount of the chromatic dispersion of the tested systems. For the 40 Gbit/s system, the maximum detectable chromatic dispersion was around 130-ps/nm and a resolution of 5-ps/nm/db was achieved at the chosen frequency band centered at 12 GHz. Performance of the microwave devices and comparison of the experimental results at different frequency bands are also discussed, which verified that the chosen center frequency was suitable for detection of CD in optical communication system beyong 10 Gbit/s speed.
A vertical-shaft-type Mirau white-light phase-shifting interferometer is designed based on white-light phase-shifting interference microscopy in this paper. The interferometer is composed of an illumination and interference imaging part, a piezoelectric transducer in the vertical direction, a two-dimensional scanning part in the test surface, image collection and interferograms analysis part. The light illuminates the sample and the test surface uniformly, and the interferogram is formed. In order to get phase-shifting, the move of the objective is driven by PZT. The three-dimensional scanning system consists of a two-dimensional horizontal motorized stage and a vertical piezoelectric transducer. Multi-aperture stitching extends the measurement range in the test surface. A new pixel divided phase-extracting algorithm was put forward in combination with a residues-pretreatment phase-unwrapping algorithm based on image segmentation. The algorithm is used to minimize the phase-shifting error and nonlinearity error of the detector. The surface profile of a fiber connector with fiber inserted was measured. Mean value of the protrusion between fiber and fiber connector was measured to be 45.7nm, with 0.9 nm error. The mean height of a spot on the end surface of fiber connector was measured to be 23.6nm, with 0.7nm error.
A white light Michelson interferometer is designed to measure the distributed polarization mode coupling in High birefringence polarization-maintaining fibers (HiBi-PMFs). Using a Michelson interferometer to compensate the optical path difference induced by the modal birefringence of PMF, both power coupling intensity and position of the coupling point can be acquired. Traditionally, this technique requires only one polarization mode in the PMF to be exited or both polarization modes to be exited with equal intensity. This needs precise alignment of the polarization direction with the principal axis of the PMF. In practice, it's not easy to realize. In this paper, the influence of the incident polarization extinction ratio (PER) on the measurement result was evaluated theoretically and experimentally. A polarization state adjusting mechanism is designed. An analyzer can be oriented at any angle of the PMF's principle axes. By alternating this angle between 0o, 90o and 45o, the incident PER can be calculated and the measurement can be carried out with random exited polarization mode. An instrument was designed and implemented to verify this scheme. Spatial resolution better than 7cm and coupling strength sensitivity less than -75dB are realized.
A multichannel bidirectional dynamic data transmission system (DDTS) through a rotary interface with one fiber is designed based on a fabricated single pass fiber optic rotary joint. The feasibility of transmission system is tested at both 1310- and 1550-nm wavelength bands. The performance of this DDTS was measured using optical spectrum analyzer and lightwave multimeter. The insertion losses of DDTS were 1.55 and 1.20 dB at 1310- and 1550-nm wavelength bands, respectively. The total bandwidth of the DDTS is more than 170 nm.
Both hardware and software are optimized simultaneously to improve the bus throughput of node computer in cluster computing network. A cost effective optical interconnection ring network is established using off-the-shelf PCs with windows operating system. A network adapter card ONIC is developed. Using ETDM and field program technique, the full bandwidth of the 32bit×33MHz PCI bus is reached in physical layer. In order to overcome the hardware and software data bottlenecks induced by using of general purpose platform such as PCs and Windows 2000 system, several methods are adopted to maximum the bus throughput of node computer. A user-level interface is designed to blur the kernel/user mode boundary of the software system, and bypass the OS overhead. Zero-copy DMA is realized. The bandwidth in application level using PIO and DMA transfer mode is improved 17 and 26 times respectively. The sustained bandwidth in application layer can reach 437.6Mbit/s. It’s also shown theoretically and experimentally that the selection of main board chipset, using memory space map, reasonable using of PIO and DMA transfer mode, using polling and large MTU will also improve the bus throughput of node computer considerably.
This paper deals with the problem that a great number of rotary joints are suffering the conflict between high efficiency of signal dynamic coupling and low requirement of precision mechanism. As a solution, a specific design of the infrared spatial interconnection rotary joint is presented accompanying with the discussion of requirements for the mechanism and the circuit. Benefit from infrared data interconnection between the stator and the rotor, the security of data transfer is ensured and the off-axis angle can vary from 0º to 30º, which contribute to a simpler mechanism and a compact rotary joint. Relative experiment shows that with this rotary joint, signals can be transmit securely, and the efficient data transmission speed is up to 1.4Mbps under Windows 2000 circumstance.
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