Steered and Cued ID Lidar (SCIL)

The Air Force needs affordable technology to improve missile seekers that are currently limited by obscured targets. Lidar can be used to see through obscurations and provide a dependable ID and aimpoint selection. Lidar equipped munitions, combined with a wider FOV passive sensor, can either be launched at a specific target or can be launched into a region to find its own target. Each munition that is launched would have the ability to provide an abundance of 3D information which will contribute to the mosaic warfare distributed site picture. We plan on using an LWIR pyro-electric thermal imager to make the seeker more. We expect to have about a 30 milli degree temperature sensitivity for the LWIR thermal imager. The use of spectral imaging as well as spatial in the LWIR imager will be a Phase 1 design trade space. The passive LWIR camera will provide anomaly detection, and will cue the lidar to ID potential targets and provide wide FOV situational awareness. The critical aspect of this effort will be the patent pending optical beam steering capability that Exciting Technology LLC has developed. This technology will allow us to have the lidar provide ID to spatially distributed anomalies distributed randomly across the LWIR imager FOV. We will plan on initially using our innovative, patent pending, mechanical beam steering for the lidar, but will plan on transitioning to using optical phased array (OPA) based optical beam steering during Phase 2. We will view as much as 40 degrees with the passive imager, and dynamically steer the Lidar to investigate anomalies within that FOV. The main technology development areas for this effort are lidar and optical beam steering, areas where Exciting Technology LLC has a significant technical capability. Exciting Technology has 26 patents granted or pending in the beam steering and lidar technical areas. Dr McManamon chaired the national academy of sciences study on lidar/laser radar, has multiple highly cited papers on optical beam steering and lidar, and has written two books on lidar. His 2019 book, Lidar Technologies and Systems received the prestigious Goodman book award jointly award by Optica and SPIE. Exciting Technology has patent submissions in both mechanical and non-mechanical optical beam steering. Our novel mechanical steering systems can be made now and will significantly out-perform existing beam steering methods. One of the novel features of our beam steering is we can use the full 4.5 cm diameter optical aperture for a static LWIR imager, and a dynamically pointed 1550 nm lidar. We can do this using both mechanical and nonmechanical lidar beam pointing. Once we transition to OPA based beam pointing we will be able to point anywhere within the LWIR FOV within 10 µsec. To our knowledge we are the only company capable of using the full aperture with excellent optical quality for the unsteered LWIR imager and the steered lidar.