Positioning apparatus and method

Abstract

There is provided an apparatus for, and a method of, driving a plurality of uniaxial positioning elements of positioning stages to perform an automated search to find a signal in a multi-dimensional search space having a dimensionality equal to the number of alignment axes. The automated signal location is achieved by scanning over a search pattern defined by a succession of n−1 dimensional closed hyper-surfaces in an n-dimensional search-space, where n is the number of positioning axes involved in the alignment process. In an embodiment of the invention hyper-cubes are used as the hyper-surfaces and the search path follows a hyper-spiral track over hyper-surfaces of incrementally increasing size. One application is to align input and output optical fibers with a solid-state waveguide structure mounted on a plinth under the control of a positioner controller which outputs motion control signals for the positioning elements over control paths so as to scan over paths on a succession of nested hyper-surfaces until a signal is received through a signal line.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.