Method for calibrating system parameters of a multidirectional interferometers system

A multidirectional interferometer system has been proposed and developed to measure the position and orientation of a positioning stage. In this method the system parameters, such as positions of the corner-cube reflectors and directions of the rays in the interferometers, must be determined beforehand. However, it is difficult to find ways to determine the system parameters for each different system with necessary accuracy. This paper proposes a systematic method for calibrating the system parameters when the number of the interferometers is larger than the degrees of freedom of the stage. The method is verified for a two-dimensional stage by both simulation and experiment.