Development of the laser beam scanner which uses the prism cube mirror with DMD

In recent years, lasers are used widely in fields such as measurements, communications, and medical cares. In those fields, a device for scanning a laser beam quickly and exactly is required. In the field of measurements in particular, laser beam scanners which use a motor driven mirror such as galvanometer mirror or a polygon mirror have been employed. However, there have problems for downsizing of the sensor, or making the scanning faster. We propose a laser beam scanner which uses a special mirror (a prism cube mirror) with DMD to solve the problems. The laser beam can be emitted to various directions by reflecting many times between DMD and inside surfaces of the prism cube mirror. In this paper, we describe the principle of the direction control of the laser beam using the prism cube mirror and DMD, the developed system. Also we show some experimental results to verify our proposed technique.