Design, analysis, and manufacturing of a glass-plastic hybrid minimalist aspheric panoramic annular lens

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel glass-plastic hybrid panoramic lens with a 360°x(35°~110°) FoV, near-diffraction-limited quality, and a lightweight design suitable for space and micro-robot applications.

Contribution

It presents a new minimalistic hybrid lens design, a physical model for system optimization, and a tolerance analysis method for manufacturing, enabling lightweight and high-quality panoramic imaging.

Findings

Achieved a 8.5 g lightweight lens prototype.

Designed a 4-element lens system with near-diffraction-limited quality.

Developed a manufacturing and tolerance analysis framework for ASPAL.

Abstract

We propose a high-performance glass-plastic hybrid minimalist aspheric panoramic annular lens (ASPAL) to solve several major limitations of the traditional panoramic annular lens (PAL), such as large size, high weight, and complex system. The field of view (FoV) of the ASPAL is 360{\deg}x(35{\deg}~110{\deg}) and the imaging quality is close to the diffraction limit. This large FoV ASPAL is composed of only 4 lenses. Moreover, we establish a physical structure model of PAL using the ray tracing method and study the influence of its physical parameters on compactness ratio. In addition, for the evaluation of local tolerances of annular surfaces, we propose a tolerance analysis method suitable for ASPAL. This analytical method can effectively analyze surface irregularities on annular surfaces and provide clear guidance on manufacturing tolerances for ASPAL. Benefiting from high-precision glass molding and injection molding aspheric lens manufacturing techniques, we finally manufactured 20 ASPALs in small batches. The weight of an ASPAL prototype is only 8.5 g. Our framework provides promising insights for the application of panoramic systems in space and weight-constrained environmental sensing scenarios such as intelligent security, micro-UAVs, and micro-robots.