TREX ENTERPRISES CORPORATION — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: HR001120S0019-05

Description

Lasers present a threat to military forces. They can damage the eyesight of dismounted soldiers, operators of ground vehicles and pilots, as well as damage EO/IR sensors. Existing solutions operate over a narrow spectral band, have small field-of-view (FOV), have large size, weight and power (SWaP) and do not meet the requirements of the solicitation. Trex proposes a wearable Laser Alert System (LAS), which overcomes all limitations of existing systems and is constructed using ultra-low-cost COTS components. It operates over a large spectral band (450-1600nm), has an ultra large (220°) FOV, and has low size, weight and power (SWaP) with mass < 100g, volume = 1.5 cu inch, and can operate for 192 hours on a single battery charge. LAS can discriminate laser against non-laser sources with low false alarm rate because a diffractive grating produces different effects on light from a narrowband laser and a broadband background source.  A processing algorithm accurately rejects background sources based on their size and lack of sharp higher order diffraction lobes present in the image of a narrowband laser source. The measurement time is