Error compensation in a pointing system based on Risley prisms

Risley prisms are widely used for beam pointing in several optical systems. The exact solution for the inverse problem does not exist, except using numerical methods. However, the errors introduced by misalignment are usually greater than the approximation errors. We present a novel method to compensate alignment errors in pointing systems based on Risley prisms. The prism model that we used is based on paraxial approximation with an additional vector to compensate typical alignment errors. Simulation and experimental results show that the improvement in pointing accuracy is achievable even in comparison with exact ray tracing methods. (C) 2017 Optical Society of America