Design and development of measuring device for beam pointing and positional errors in multi-axes laser interferometric systems

The mechanism of Abbe error and cosine error resulting from beam pointing and positional errors in a laser interference measurement system was analyzed, a PSD-based measurement method was proposed to measure both errors simultaneously. A light intensity adaptive measuring device was designed for measurement of pointing and positional errors. Experimental results indicated that the measuring range and resolution of the position deviation could reach ±4.5mm and 1μm respectively; the angular range and resolution could reach ±0.112rad and 25μrad.