The necessity of measuring the position and attitude of a target item almost instantaneously, and with very high precision, is a challenging task. Such measurements are required by an increasing range of advanced applications, aerospace engineering being an application field par excellence. Most of the advanced metrological systems currently available are highly complex, adopting a range of different technologies. Here we present a conceptually simple yet innovative optical approach based on a compact bifocal projective system and a target identifier consisting of three light spots. First, a brief introduction to the space engineering context is presented, and the bifocal system concept is outlined. Next, the underlying mathematical framework is discussed, with insights pertaining to the related error analysis. This is followed by the formulation of two optimization problems concerning system sizing and light spot shaping, and the discussion of a real-world application.


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