Productivity Analysis and Control of Advanced Scanning Systems for Digital Photonic Production

The desired flexibility of a laser beam as a tool for materials processing as well as the steadily growing processing throughput requirements demand for advanced scanning systems. Suitable digital control concepts and corresponding scanner hardware enables new concepts of combining multiple scanners to address the challenges of digital photonic production for industrial applications. We present a control architecture for advanced optical scanning systems consisting of sequentially cascaded scanners that allow for increased scanning speeds as well as quasi-beam shaping features by ultrafast beam steering. This architecture shows potential to significantly increasing the productivity through freely programmable scan strategies that allow for new use cases in photonic production. Key to the improvements and flexibility in using advanced scanning systems are their zero-tracking-error controllers combined with a trajectory planning approach. This also facilitates the real time synchronization of diffractive and opto-mechanic scanning systems. A prototypic cascaded optical scanning system demonstrates various use cases for which reachable productivities are analyzed.