Optical Straightness Measuring System Using a Ball-lens

This paper proposes a simple method to improve a sensitivity of a straightness measurement system for a linear stage, which is applied to a system based on a geometric optic method. An optical system for this method is composed of a corner-cube retro-reflector, a ball-lens and a two-dimensional position sensitive detector (2D PSD). The effectiveness of the proposed method was examined theoretically, and verified experimentally using a prototype measurement system. The results show that the measuring sensitivity was dependent on the size of the ball-lens and the setup position of PSD from the ball-lens, and that the proposed method is efficient method to improve the measuring sensitivity