Video Guidance Sensor and Time-of-Flight Rangefinder

A proposed video guidance sensor (VGS) would be based mostly on the hardware and software of a prior Advanced VGS (AVGS), with some additions to enable it to function as a time-of-flight rangefinder (in contradistinction to a triangulation or image-processing rangefinder). It would typically be used at distances of the order of 2 or 3 kilometers, where a typical target would appear in a video image as a single blob, making it possible to extract the direction to the target (but not the orientation of the target or the distance to the target) from a video image of light reflected from the target. As described in several previous NASA Tech Briefs articles, an AVGS system is an optoelectronic system that provides guidance for automated docking of two vehicles. In the original application, the two vehicles are spacecraft, but the basic principles of design and operation of the system are applicable to aircraft, robots, objects maneuvered by cranes, or other objects that may be required to be aligned and brought together automatically or under remote control. In a prior AVGS system of the type upon which the now-proposed VGS is largely based, the tracked vehicle is equipped with one or more passive targets that reflect light from one or more continuous-wave laser diode(s) on the tracking vehicle, a video camera on the tracking vehicle acquires images of the targets in the reflected laser light, the video images are digitized, and the image data are processed to obtain the direction to the target. The design concept of the proposed VGS does not call for any memory or processor hardware beyond that already present in the prior AVGS, but does call for some additional hardware and some additional software. It also calls for assignment of some additional tasks to two subsystems that are parts of the prior VGS: a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) that generates timing and control signals, and a digital signal processor (DSP) that processes the digitized video images. The additional timing and control signals generated by the FPGA would cause the VGS to alternate between an imaging (direction-finding) mode and a time-of-flight (range-finding mode) and would govern operation in the range-finding mode.