Acquisition,Pointing and Tracking System for Shipborne Space Laser Communication without Prior Information

A space laser communication acquisition,pointing and tracking(APT)system based on the beacon laser is designed without prior information.And then,a new target scanning method and a pointing and tracking algorithm are proposed.The target scanning mode is the round-trip triangular wave scanning,and it means that scanning track of the PAN-TILT platform follows the triangular wave repeatedly.For the pointing and tracking algorithm,the beacon laser is used as the auxiliary aiming light source.The position of the beacon laser in the viewfield of the complementary metal oxide semiconductor(CMOS)camera is calculated by the centroid algorithm.In order to realize the target tracking,the joint control method of the angle control and the angular velocity control is used.The simulation and experimental results show that the APT system can achieve full coverage scanning in the scanning area and capture the target in one scanning cycle successfully.After capturing the PAN-TILT platform,the pointing and tracking algorithm can track the PAN-TILT platform quickly and accurately,and the tracking accuracy is up to 0.22 mrad.

High-speed free-space optical communication using standard fiber communication components without optical amplification

Free-space optical communication(FSO)can achieve fast,secure,and license-free communication without physical cables,providing a cost-effective,energy-efficient,and flexible solution when fiber connection is unavailable.To achieve FSO on demand,portable FSO devices are essential for flexible and fast deployment,where the key is achieving compact structure and plug-and-play operation.Here,we develop a miniaturized FSO system and realize 9.16 Gbps FSO in a 1 km link,using commercial single-mode-fibercoupled optical transceiver modules without optical amplification.Fully automatic four-stage acquisition,pointing,and tracking systems are developed,which control the tracking error within 3μrad,resulting in an average link loss of 13.7 dB.It is the key for removing optical amplification;hence FSO is achieved with direct use of commercial transceiver modules in a bidirectional way.Each FSO device is within an overall size of 45 cm×40 cm×35 cm,and 9.5 kg weight,with power consumption of∼10 W.The optical link up to 4 km is tested with average loss of 18 dB,limited by the foggy test environment.With better weather conditions and optical amplification,longer FSO can be expected.Such a portable and automatic FSO system will produce massive applications of field-deployable high-speed wireless communication in the future.