OKU Laboratory

Saccade Mirror 3

　

Our Laboratory has been developing "1ms Auto Pan/Tilt" technology that can automatically control the camera's pan/tilt angles to keep an object always at the center of field using a high-speed optical gaze controller called “Saccade Mirror”.  However, the saccade mirror has a limited gaze control range, namely, up to 60 degree for each axis.

For example, supposing that a single saccade mirror tries to track a ball in a football field with a width of more than 100 m, it is necessary to place the saccade mirror at least 87 m away from the edge of the field to cover the entire field. Whether there is enough space for placement of the saccade mirror system depends on the structure of the stadium.

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To solve this problem, we developed a new high-speed optical gaze controller with wide range based on three automated rotational mirrors, named "Saccade Mirror 3". A developed prototype of the Saccade Mirror 3 had a maximum pan range of 262 deg. Therefore, the problem of the existing Saccade Mirror was basically solved.

Fig.1 shows a photograph of the developed prototype. Fig.2 shows a photograph of the setups for tracking a flying drone and an image sequence captured by the high-speed vision system. This indicated that the prototype could track the object in a pan angle range of more than 180 deg. range. The prototype also demonstrated the successful tracking of the high-speed and randomly moving table tennis ball.
These results are shown in the movie. From above results, the wide gaze range and the high-speed response of the Saccade Mirror 3 were confirmed.