Development of a vision-based optical fiber alignment platform based on the multirate technique

Automatic optical fiber alignment is the key to reduce the cost of the packaging process for the manufacture of fiber-optic devices. This study develops a vision-based active optical fiber alignment technique using a piezo-actuated moving platform which is controlled to reduce the alignment difference to a certain degree. In the proposed approach, the centroid of the optical fibers to be aligned can be determined from the captured image so that the line equations for the optical fibers as well as the alignment differences can be obtained. To overcome the adverse effect from the delay time between the motion control system and vision system, the methodology based on the multirate control scheme is presented. Experimental results verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach.