Luminit LLC — Department of Defense SBIR Phase II: A14-008

Description

To address the Army need for a semi-active laser missile tracker that can lock onto a coded illuminator signal and ignore background noise such as sunlight, Luminit, LLC, proposes to continue development on the Compound Eye Laser Missile Seeker (CELMS). The CELMS is a compound eye device, based on the eye of a bee, with a number of independent lenses in a square array. Each individual lens is coupled to a light guide; each quadrant of the missiles field of regard relays the light from its quadrant to one substrate guided wave-based hologram (SGWH). Luminits proprietary SGWH filters the light in a fashion that removes the background and passes the signal which, in turn, is converted to a voltage by a photodetector and custom electronics. This voltage is further processed into guidance signals for the missile. In Phase I, Luminit designed the CELMS and fabricated a proof-of-concept prototype that demonstrated tracking a week laser signal in the presence of strong sunlight. In Phase II, we plan to develop the CELMS into a complete engineering prototype that will be the basis of a production version of CELMS to be finalized during Phase III.