Underwater Lens Design

Introduction to the Project

This was a fun project and a pretty unique one too. Our customer was looking to acquire high-resolution imagery underwater, and they’d built some prototypes using a lens you might find in a Nikon or Canon camera and came to us asking if we could create a corrector window for that lens to give us the same performance. The really tough thing is, when you put that lens underwater, you’re never going to get quite to the same level of performance, and after some feasibility testing, we saw that the cost and complexity of doing that really outweighed the benefit.

Choosing a New Lens Design Approach

The best path forward for this application would be to design a bespoke, easily manufacturable, high-volume lens to get the kind of high-resolution imagery that they were looking for. And the tough thing is, we needed to do that in the same timeline they were looking for just a corrector window to keep their entire program on schedule.

Prototype Development

Fast-forward four months, and we are testing prototypes of an athermalized high-resolution underwater imaging lens that includes a fully toleranced optical design, optomechanics, camera mounting, and alignment. One particularly unique aspect of this project is the testing requirement.

Solving the Testing Challenge

How do you prove that a lens that is used underwater is performing to spec when you build it in air? Well, you have to put it in a swimming pool.

Custom Testing and Validation

Optikos did some verification testing using our own swimming pool of sorts and proved out the performance. We also developed a custom test fixture to simulate underwater objects and used our swimming pool to validate its performance so that we could have a compact manufacturing line–ready assembly process. This tool allows us to actively align each camera and verify full field performance before shipping. We produce this lens, integrate the camera, and perform a hundred percent inspection today in our Massachusetts facility. Thankfully, we’ve retired the swimming pool.

Aggressive Timeline and Project Success

This whole project was an aggressive timeline. It was six months from first contact to fully functional prototypes, three months to a pilot build, and another three months to deliver our first three hundred and fifty production-ready lenses. This was an exciting project for everybody, with unique design challenges, unique testing requirements, challenging production schedule, and cross targets.

Have a project in mind? Get started here.