• International Journal of Precision Engineering and Manufacturing
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• v.8 no.2
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• pp.14-19
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• 2007

Angle sensors based on the principle of autocollimation, which are usually called autocollimators, can accurately measure small tilt angles of a light-reflecting flat surface. This paper describes a prototype micro-angle sensor that is based on the laser autocollimation technique. The new angle sensor is compact and consists of a laser diode as the light source and a quadrant photodiode as a position-sensing device. Because of its concise design, the microangle sensor facilitates dynamic measurements of the angular error motions of a precision stage without influencing the original dynamic properties of the stage. This is because the sensor only requires a small extra target mirror to be mounted on the stage. The sensitivity of the angle detection is independent of the focal length of the objective lens; therefore, an objective lens with a relatively short focal length is employed to reduce the size of the device. The micro-angle sensor uses a single lens for the both the laser collimation and focusing, which distinguishes it from the conventional laser autocollimation method that has separate collimate and objective lenses. The new micro-angle sensor has dimensions of $15.1\times22.0\times14.0mm$ and its resolution is better than 0.1 arc-second The optical design and performance of this micro-angle sensor were verified by experimental results.