Time of flight telemeter with picosecond modelocked laser

In this work is presented the design and the preliminary promising experimental results obtained by our new two-way time-of-flight telemeter. The system is based on the evaluation of the phase delay of the returning optical pulses train with respect to the outgoing one, generated from a femtosecond laser. The main idea is to expand the phase difference time delay measured with the adoption of a heterodyne method, beating at high harmonic, till 10 GHz, applied symmetrically to the two channels. It is expected that micrometer absolute accuracies and better repeatability can be obtained in this way than in simple time of flight telemetry.