The following presents a succinct summary of one or more embodiments in order to provide a basic understanding of the present invention. This summary is not an extensive overview of all contemplated embodiments and is not intended to identify key or critical elements of all embodiments nor delineate the scope of any or all embodiments. Its sole purpose is to present some concepts of one or more embodiments in a streamlined form as a prelude to the more detailed description that is presented later.According to an aspect of an embodiment there is disclosed an apparatus for and method of permitting automatic alignment of optical components in the beam path of a laser. Images of the beam are obtained at one or more positions in the beam path. Alignment information is derived based on the images and then actuators are controlled to alter the alignment of the optical components in the beam path.According to another aspect of an embodiment there is disclosed an apparatus for aligning an optical module arranged along a beam path of a beam in a laser light source, the apparatus comprising a beam imager arranged to acquire an image of the beam after the beam has interacted with the optical module, an image analysis module arranged to receive the image and adapted to make an alignment determination of an alignment state of the optical module based at least in part on the image and to generate a control signal based on the alignment determination, and an actuator mechanically coupled to the optical module and arranged to alter the alignment state of the optical module based on the control signal.The beam path may comprise a power ring amplifier (PRA) alignment path including the optical module. The optical module may comprise at least one of a master oscillator (MO) wavefront engineering box (WEB), a PRA WEB, a PRA chamber, a beam reverser (BR), and an autoshutter module. The optical module may comprise the BR and wherein the image is acquired of the beam at the autoshutter module. The autoshutter module may comprise a combined autoshutter and metrology module.The image analysis module may be adapted to make the alignment determination based at least in part on detection of at least one edge of an aperture in the optical module. The image analysis module may be adapted to control the actuator to sweep the beam across the aperture to detect at least one edge of the aperture. The image analysis module may be adapted to detect the at least one edge of the aperture using a Hough transform. The image analysis module may be adapted to detect a window and determine a center of the window using an object detecting model. The image analysis module may be adapted to detect the window and determine a center of the window using a Haar Cascade Classifier.The image analysis module may be adapted to make the alignment determination of the optical module based at least in part on labeling of one or more contours in the image as one of a primary beam and a secondary beam. The image analysis module may be adapted to control the actuator to cause the secondary beam and the primary beam to merge to form a merged beam. The image analysis module may be adapted to control the actuator to increase a symmetry of the merged beam. According to another aspect of an embodiment there is disclosed a method of aligning an optical modules arranged in a beam path of a beam in a laser light source, the method comprising acquiring an image of the beam after the beam has interacted with the optical module, making an alignment determination of an alignment state of the optical module based at least in part on the image, generating a control signal based on the alignment determination, and using the control signal to control an actuator mechanically coupled to the optical module to alter an alignment state of the optical module. The beam path may comprise a PRA alignment path. The optical module may comprise one of a MO WEB, a PRA WEB, a PRA chamber, a BR and an autoshutter mo
展开▼
