As it may be obvious from my question, I am novice to optics. And I'm aking friendly expert advise. My hypotethical scenario is sketched to learn about how to use polarized light in indoor and outdoor robotics applications.
What I would like to do is to determine the relative attitude of two mobile robotic platforms, or the attitude of a mobile robot relative to a stationary node. It is easier to explain my question by using the second example
Imagine and that we have a light source projecting vertically polarised light to a wall or to a screen. Assume also that we have a receiver sensor on the mobile platform with a polarising filter in front of it, and it is pointed toward to the same wall/screen. Depending on the relative angle of the polarised light source the receiver's polarizing filter, we will measure different intensities.
If we rotate the receiver's polarising filter continuously, in ideal situation, I would expect to observe a sinusoidal wave form for the measured light intensity. Instead of dealing with the absolute intensity values from the receiver sensor, if you detect the peak of the sinusoidal wave then we may find the best alignment with the projected light and the receiver polarizations. Since we know the rolative angle of the receiver filter with respect to the our mobile platform, we can find the relative angle/attitude of our robot with repect to the light projecting node.
Now if we assume that the polarised light projector is mounted on a mobile robot and it is pointing to another robot, then we can find the relative angle of these two robots.
Questions; 1. If I put a linear polarizing filter (removed from low a cost 3D glasses, any suggestion from where I can get a better one -low cost please-) infront of our light source and project the light to an ordinary wall, due to the uneven surface of the wall will we lost the the polarization ? 2. How to make a wall/screen which preserves the polarization of the projected light? 3. Can we use either ordinary visible light (a light bulb) or a bunch of IR LED as the light source behind the polarizing filter? (Do IR light from the LED can be polarized as normal light?) 4. In an outdoor situation, if we have a long flat road and two mobile robots on opposite ends of the road, pointing to each other, can we use the above mentioned method to detect the relative angles between the robots? 5. How daylight effect our polarized light experiment? 6. Can you suggest an "optical" method which allows us to determine the rolative angle of two mobile robots seperated from each other by
100-200 meters? (Yes, it sound like a big ask!) 7. Thanks in advance for the friendly advices.Cheers,
Miem Chan