The creation of smart and autonomous manufacturing chains is reliant on the development of suitable sensors to provide the feedback required, improving the quality of the parts made, reducing scrappage and allowing bespoke one-off items to be manufactured right first-time every-time. Optical measurements would seem ideal for just such applications, however the optical instrumentation that is employed to take them is often far too large and heavy for deployment where they would be of most use, and the use of traditional refractive elements limit the size and weight reductions that can be achieved. Here we present our work on using metasurfaces to overcome just such problems, developing a miniaturized chromatic confocal sensor by exploiting the chromatic aberration found with a basic hyperbolic metalens to our advantage. Further we show how the range and resolution of this device can be modified through design, delivering a compact, rapid, and highly practical sensor.
|