Analysis of Echo Characteristics of Pulsed Laser Short-Range Detection Based on Light Cone Beam Expansion Mechanism

This study aims to fill the existing gap in laser detection research, particularly regarding how the waveform of outgoing laser pulses affects detection performance. Based on the mechanism of light cone beam expansion, this study emits three different laser pulse signals to detect short-range targets. A theoretical model for short-range ranging of these lasers is established, and the effects of emission power, divergence angle, and equivalent root mean square noise voltage on circumferential detection accuracy are simulated and experimentally measured. As emission power decreases, both echo amplitude and detection accuracy decline for all three pulsed lasers. Additionally, except for the inverted parabolic function, both echo amplitude and detection accuracy decrease with reduced divergence angle. An increase in equivalent root mean square noise voltage broadens the half-width of the probability density distribution for pulsed laser detection. The mean central position deviation between the ideal and measured detection probability density distributions of the heavy-tailed function laser pulses shows the best performance and the highest fidelity, which are +0.01 m, +0.05 m, and +0.02 m, respectively, which is of great significance for the development of laser detection technology.