Design and development of a scene illuminator using low-cost laser pointers

The aim behind this work is the development of a new laser illuminator for scene lighting that combines seven low-cost green laser pointers with an average power of 53 mW for each one. This laser illuminator presents several advantages: it is cheap, efficient, and portable, and it can produce clear images at long distances in the active laser illumination domain. We have used computer aided design tools like TracePro©and Solidworks©softwares to optimize both the optical design and mechanical parts. In order to collimate the resulting beam and minimize its divergence, a light guide with different shapes was used. The performed simulations indicate that the cylindrical cone light guide gives better performance of the laser illuminator. The proposed design results in 342 mW overall optical power with an optical-optical efficiency of 92.06 \(\%\) $\%$ , a beam divergence of 7.33 mrad, a beam diameter of 5.31 mm and an \(M^2\) $M^2$ quality factor of 28.68. The experimental results were almost reliable with the TracePro©simulation and finally the developed illuminator laser was tested in imaging application case.