Award Data

A shape capture system for field and industrial capture of surface contours and discontinuous shapes is proposed. The system will provide accuracy of 0.01 inch or better at over 1 million points distributed over a region 100 inches across from three or more images obtained with a high resolution handheld digital camera. A tripod or bench mounted projector projects a pattern onto the surface from ...

Aculight has teamed with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UCSD to develop and demonstrate an underwater imager capable of imaging through 7 – 8 attenuation lengths. Such an optical underwater imager capable of imaging mines or other objects of interest is needed by the Navy to enable detection of submerged threats in turbid coastal and harbor waters. The objective of the proposed p ...

Three-dimensional laser radar (LADAR) systems have proven to be effective tools for real time 3D image generation enabling autonomous target detection and recognition. They have demonstrated high probability of detection and identification of unobstructed targets; however, the challenges of extracting sufficient target information out of background clutter can limit the usefulness of these system ...

Mid-infrared laser have been demonstrated to provide unique capabilities in infrared countermeasures systems. It is desired to increase the power output from optically pumped semiconductor lasers to address future system requirements. The proposed work will investigate beam combining technologies and novel semiconductor device mounting that improves the thermal management of the lasers, potentia ...

Compact laser systems are needed to interrogate possible sites of nuclear proliferation that, for strategic or political reasons, cannot be sampled and inspected directly. This laser system would be used with a nonlinear optical wavelength converter for remote spectroscopic analysis of effluents from suspected sites. This project will develop an advanced laser system that will be compact, lightw ...

Tunable laser spectrometers are used by NASA for investigations of planetary atmospheric constituent gases. The availability of widely tunable long-wavelength (3 to 12?Ym) lasers operating at room temperature would allow such spectrometers to a wider range of gas species detection sensitivity increased by orders-of-magnitude relative to near-infrared lasers currently used in these applications. Ac ...

Improved measurements and understanding of cirrus clouds is essential for the accurate modeling of climate change and, in particular, for feedback effects that respond (positively or negatively) to greenhouse-gas global warming. Unfortunately, the reliable autonomous detection of sub-visual cirrus clouds is limited by the poor signal-to-noise ratio of existing micropulse lidars. Backscatter lida ...

Aculight proposes a fiber beam combining approach that provides the efficiency, thermal management, power-independent beam quality and ruggedness of fiber lasers with a system architecture scaleable to 10 kW and beyond. The approach is scaleable to 100+kW for military directed energy applications such as defense against rockets, artillery and mortars (RAM). The proposed work leverages Aculight†...

Aculight proposes a new spectral beam combining (SBC) system to utilize higher power, broader linewidth, fiber lasers to meet the demanding requirements of high energy laser (HEL) applications. The system is scalable to up to 100 kW output with diffraction limited beam quality by spectrally combining a number of high power fiber lasers operating at slightly different wavelengths. The proposed ap ...

Aculight proposes a scalable approach to passive phasing of fiber laser arrays to meet the requirements of high power, high spatial brightness sources for high energy laser (HEL) applications. The system design is scalable to up to 100 kW output with high brightness. The proposed approach will establish generalized scaling rules enabling the laser designer to confidently predict the degree to whi ...