Calculating the laser safety hazard for scanning systems

Recently, many optical systems are employing lasers (indoor and outdoor) to sense objects at considerable ranges over large fields of regard. These can involve powerful wide field-of-view flash LIDAR systems or less powerful, very narrow divergence lasers scanned over the field of regard. Despite the fact that Z136.1 does not directly address scanning laser systems directly (except in a few appendices), there are ways to apply the random periodic exposure standards to various types of scanned systems to determine eye safety and hazard ranges. These can range from some simple approximations all the way to very detailed models. These apply to both pulsed and continuous-wave scanned laser systems. Naturally, the laser wavelength and laser power are critical, but the scan pattern also has a very large effect. Several example calculations taken from actual systems are shown.