Bistatic Expendable Lidar Seeker

DLiSS is a design for a bistatic lidar system for purposes of target recognition that allows for a simple receiver design.  This receiver design requires very low pointing accuracy and stability, yet allows for high accuracy reconstructions of the target.  The receiver is designed to be expendable.  The transmitter is more complex and, while not expensive, is not designed to be expendable.  The details of the transmitter/receiver coupling are proprietary and may be viewed in the full proposal. Because of the bistatic nature of the system, any signal is able to be received by multiple receivers, opening the possibility of seeing a variety of viewpoints of the object and potentially characterizing its BRDF. The receiver consists of a small collection of pixels (effectively a single pixel) on an inexpensive COTS gimbal.  This gimbal will receive coarse pointing instructions from the transmitter and use those to receive the transmission pattern allowing a fully detailed 3D reconstruction.  The transmitter consists of a coarse pointing subsystem combined with fine beam control. The receiver is small enough to be able to be packaged as a seeker and the mechanism is extremely simple.  The computation is more complex in order to undo the complex signal transmitted, but this complex software, once written, is the ultimate in expendability. This project is an innovative design that both allows for bistatic lidar but also opens up new possibilities for drone communication.  It is constructible by engineering existing components in the context of a new type of lidar reconstruction algorithm.