System for monitoring the movements of one or more point sources of luminous radiation

Abstract

Several virtually punctiform, sequentially excited sources of luminous radiation on a pilot's helmet facilitate continuous determination of the pilot's line of sight with the aid of a linear array of photoelectric cells illuminated via a pair of mutually parallel cylindrical lenses perpendicular to the array. The light path through one of these lenses includes a beam rotator in the form of two juxtaposed prisms which turns one of two sheets of light rays from an excited source, lying originally in two mutually orthogonal planes, through 90.degree. into a plane including the axis of one of the lenses so as to intersect the array in one point while the other sheet of light rays retains its orientation in passing through the axis of the other lens to intersect the array in another point. The locations of the two points of intersection, periodically detected by a charge-coupled scanner, indicate the momentary direction of the active source whose exact position can thus be established with the aid of two radiation sensors of the type described. Alternatively, with three point sources whose mutual distances are known, the positions of these sources can be derived from their respective directions as determined by one such sensor. The nonrotated sheet of rays may pass through a simple prism serving to compensate for the difference in the path lengths of the two sheets. Two pulse counters normally synchronized with the scanner are stepped at half their normal rate in the presence of an output signal from the scanner indicative of incident radiation, thereby determining the position of a cell at or near the middle of a series of neighboring cells illuminated by such radiation.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.