Design, analysis, and manufacturing of a glass-plastic hybrid minimalist aspheric panoramic annular lens
This work addresses the problem of large size and weight in panoramic lenses for applications like intelligent security and micro-robots, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing PAL technology.
The authors tackled the limitations of traditional panoramic annular lenses (PALs) by designing a glass-plastic hybrid minimalist aspheric panoramic annular lens (ASPAL) with a 360°x(35°~110°) field of view and imaging quality close to the diffraction limit, resulting in a prototype weighing only 8.5 g.
We propose a high-performance glass-plastic hybrid minimalist aspheric panoramic annular lens (ASPAL) to solve several major limitations of the traditional panoramic annular lens (PAL), such as large size, high weight, and complex system. The field of view (FoV) of the ASPAL is 360°x(35°~110°) and the imaging quality is close to the diffraction limit. This large FoV ASPAL is composed of only 4 lenses. Moreover, we establish a physical structure model of PAL using the ray tracing method and study the influence of its physical parameters on compactness ratio. In addition, for the evaluation of local tolerances of annular surfaces, we propose a tolerance analysis method suitable for ASPAL. This analytical method can effectively analyze surface irregularities on annular surfaces and provide clear guidance on manufacturing tolerances for ASPAL. Benefiting from high-precision glass molding and injection molding aspheric lens manufacturing techniques, we finally manufactured 20 ASPALs in small batches. The weight of an ASPAL prototype is only 8.5 g. Our framework provides promising insights for the application of panoramic systems in space and weight-constrained environmental sensing scenarios such as intelligent security, micro-UAVs, and micro-robots.