Aircraft gyroscope, telecommunications, manufacturing, and surgical tools to name a few; optical systems, and especially lasers, are critical components in a host of modern devices. The manufacture of these systems supports a massive, global industry. Many of these are extraordinarily complex with dozens of optical components each of which needs to be placed in the system with enormous accuracy; any misalignment will result in poor performance, or the failure of the entire system. Currently this is accomplished by using highly qualified (even up to PhD level) and highly experienced system assembly teams who rely on a whole host of diagnostic and test equipment to make minute adjustments to the placement of each component. This is both time consuming and very expensive. It is also very difficult to modify production either terms of scale or specification. As a result these systems are very expensive and slow to respond to changing demand or potential for technical improvement. This project will develop an automated robotic and mechatronic system for assembling lasers and other optical systems. We will combine; observations of highly skilled human operators; feedback from automated diagnostic and test equipment; robotic alignment tool wielding robots; and a combination of machine learning and search algorithms which will be used to control the alignment process. The resulting system will be adaptive, able to cope with variations in part production, changes to the supply chain, modifications to the design specification, as well as being able to rapidly adapt to changes in demand. It will also result in a fundamental change to the way these systems are designed and developed and the levels of performance which can be achieved.

Bonding optical materials (glasses, crystals) to other optical or structural materials (metals, ceramics) is a key manufacturing challenge for many optical devices, as clearly articulated by our industrial partners. Our solution is to use an ultra-short pulsed laser welding process that has shown great promise but currently requires many months or even years of detailed experiments for each new material combination and geometry. Hence applications are currently limited to components made from borosilicate glasses or quartz welded to aluminium alloys and stainless steel, of typical dimension 10 mm. In this project our drive is to extend the process to new combinations of materials (including important IR materials) and shapes. To achieve this, the project will take a multi-pronged approach: (i) to create the modelling and sensing tools essential for rapid process optimisation; (ii) to engineer a new optimised laser source based on emerging 2 micron wavelength technologies, pioneering the welding process for IR optical materials; (iii) to research concepts for engineering the interface and weld/joint geometry to reduce the impact of differential thermal properties of the two materials; and (iv) to investigate scaleable welding approaches for larger parts e.g. continuous meander patterns and dynamic clamping. Finally, we will undertake a series of proof-of-principle experiments to determine the suitability of the process with a wide range of material combinations, directed towards our industrial partners' applications. Our programme of manufacturing research is aligned with the interests of our industrial collaborators, together with the academic drivers of laser material interaction knowledge, process understanding and process control. Our ultimate goal is to develop this welding process into a truly flexible and generic solution for joining optical to structural materials at a range of scales.