Eyesafe ladar testbed with coaxial color imager

A new experimental full-waveform LADAR system has been developed that fuses a pixel-aligned color imager within the same optical path. The Eye-safe LADAR Test-bed (ELT) consists of a single beam energy-detection LADAR that raster scans within the same field of view as an aperture-sharing color camera. The LADAR includes a pulsed 1.54 μm Erbium-doped fiber laser; a high-bandwidth receiver; a fine steering mirror for raster scanning; and a ball joint gimbal mirror for steering over a wide field of regard are all used. The system has a 6 inch aperture and the LADAR has pulse rate of up to 100 kHz. The color imager is folded into the optical path via a cold mirror. A novel feature of the ELT is its ability to capture LADAR and color data that are registered temporally and spatially. This allows immediate direct association of LADAR-derived 3D point coordinates with pixel coordinates of the color imagery. The mapping allows accurate pointing of the instrument at targets of interest and immediate insight into the nature and source of the LADAR phenomenology observed. The system is deployed on a custom van designed to enable experimentation with a variety of objects.