System of four distance sensors for high-accuracy measurement of topography

A novel sensor system consisting of four distance sensors is proposed for the scanning measurement of topography. The system achieves high accuracy and allows high lateral resolution. The configuration of the system can be chosen such that it guarantees perfect reconstruction of the topography in the presence of offset and pitch errors of the scan system provided the sensor measurements are error-free. Moreover, a favorable propagation of the random and systematic errors of the sensor measurements is achieved. The error influences are investigated and the sensor system is compared to a previously proposed three-sensor system by analyzing simulated data.