Automatic optical path configuration variation in off-axis mirror system design.

In current off-axis system design process, optical path configuration (OPC) of the system often remains unchanged due to the explicit physical constraints added in the optimization process, and this prevents designers from obtaining potential better results with other OPCs. In this paper, we present a method to change the OPC automatically by ray-quadrangle-based optimization. In our method, a vector is utilized to represent the OPC and a penalty function based on the difference between the current vector and its target value is added into the optimization error function. During OPC variation, obscuration can be avoided without human interference. Examples are given as validation of the proposed method.