Simultaneous ranging and velocimetry with multi-tone continuous wave lidar

In this paper, we demonstrate analytical modeling and experimental verification of simultaneous ranging and velocimetry measurements in multi-tone continuous wave lidars. To assess the ranging performance of the proposed lidar, a comparative experiment of the multi-tone continuous wave and time-of-flight techniques is performed. The average deviation in ranging is ∼0.75cm with >90% fitting accuracy, which corresponds to the uncertainty of the time-of-flight measurements due to the detector bandwidth. Simultaneous ranging and velocimetry are performed on a moving target. The velocimetry accuracy of the multi-tone continuous wave lidar is dictated by the frequency resolution of the Doppler shift, which is measured as ± 0.8cm/s. The results indicate that multi-tone continuous wave lidars can be improved to perform remote sensing for oceanography and atmospheric sciences and for autonomous vehicles without using any amplitude, frequency or phase sweeping.