High-power multi-beam diode laser transmitter for a flash imaging lidar

VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland is developing the transmitter for the “Flash Optical Sensor for TErrain Relative NAVigation” (FOSTERNAV) multi-beam flash imaging lidar. FOSTERNAV is a concept demonstrator for new guidance, navigation and control (GNC) technologies to fulfil the requirements for landing and docking of spacecraft as well as for navigation of rovers. This paper presents the design, realisation and testing of the multi-beam continuous-wave (CW) laser transmitter to be used in a 256x256 pixel flash imaging lidar. Depending on the target distance, the lidar has three operation modes using either several beams with low divergence or one single beam with a large divergence. This paper describes the transmitter part of the flash imaging lidar with focus on the electronics and especially the laser diode drivers. The transmitter contains eight fibre coupled commercial diode laser modules with a total peak optical power of 32 W at 808 nm. The main requirement for the laser diode drivers was linear modulation up to a frequency of 20 MHz allowing, for example, low distortion chirps or pseudorandom binary sequences. The laser modules contain the laser diode, a monitoring photodiode, a thermo-electric cooler, and a thermistor. The modules, designed for non-modulated and low-frequency operation, set challenging demands on the design of the drivers. Measurement results are presented on frequency response, and eye diagrams for pseudo-random binary sequences.