October 2021 - Physical Sciences Inc.

Press Release

Physical Sciences Inc. (PSI) has been awarded a program from the Naval Air Warfare Center to develop a Gigahertz LIDAR Imaging Receiver (GLIMR) to address the need for high resolution imagery from small mobile unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs).

The key innovation of PSI’s approach is the use of a compressive sensing (CS) single pixel architecture. This approach drastically reduces the required data rates, memory requirements and cost over competitive architectures, while still preserving range and intensity information. GLIMR will be paired with a chirped wideband transmitter to produce a system delivering 5cm range resolution at a 22 Hz frame rate (with paths identified for achieving 88 Hz frame rates).

PSI’s GLIMR design will produce a 3D underwater camera with 5cm range resolution and 100×100 effective pixel resolution. This design marks a significant reduction in data rate (10,000x), memory (10x) and cost (10,000x) with respect to a receiver employing parallel readout of a 100×100 array of detectors. This technique further affords flexible and dynamic trades between image resolution and frame rate depending on the mission requirements. Other benefits of the approach include the ability to range and image through turbid water with a low-cost sensor platform comprised of solid state and commercial off-the-shelf components. The output data is inherently compressed enabling reduced bandwidth transmission. The approach is well suited for small UUV deployment for underwater mine detection, cable inspection and mapping.

For more information, contact:

Dr. Julia Dupuis
Vice President, Tactical Systems
jdupuis@psicorp.com
Physical Sciences Inc.
Telephone: (978) 689-0003

Press Release

Physical Sciences Inc (PSI) has been awarded a research program from the Naval Air Warfare Center to develop a Sealed Complete Vacuum Equipment (SeaCoVE) as a supporting technology for portable atom-based sensors (clocks or inertial systems) based on measurements of a vapor of laser-cooled atoms.

The single volume ultra-high vacuum (UHV) system of the SeaCoVE provides the lowest size, weight and power vacuum solution, and will passively maintain favorable conditions for atom trapping over five years to enable sensor operation in custom optical geometries compatible with atomic clock, accelerometer or gyroscope configurations.

PSI’s package enables a new class of portable atom interferometers or atomic clocks used in applications such as gravitational field mapping, mineral exploration, inertial navigation in GPS denied environments, and gravitational tomographic imaging.

For more information, contact:

Dr. Chris Gittins
Group Leader, Marine Technologies
cgittins@psicorp.com
Physical Sciences Inc.
Telephone: (978) 689-0003

Presentation

Abstract

We developed a design for a high efficiency, broadband metalens –Used a heuristic approach, based on mature diffractive optic design methods –> 90% transmission efficiency in each of the red, green and blue color bands –Maintains performance out to > 10 10°AOI •Metalens can be used to correct aberrations in multi element optical systems –Corrective doublets –Multi Acknowledgement of Support and Disclaimer This material is based upon work supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) under Contract No. 140D0420C0065. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA); or its Contracting Agent, the U.S. Department of the Interior, Interior Business Center, Acquisition Services Directorate, Division III. This material is based upon work supported by the DARPA STTR Program Office under Contract No. W31P4Q-21-C-0031. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the DARPA STTR Program Office.

©2021 Physical Sciences Inc. This paper was presented at the OSA Optical Design and Fabrication Congress, June 27 - July 1, 2021, OSA Virtual Event and is made available as an electronic reprint with the permission of OSA.

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