Patent 7548305 was granted and assigned to Lockheed Martin on June, 2009 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
A system for providing shape determination of a planar or quasi-planar surface is disclosed. The system includes a number of targets located on the surface and one or more sensor devices. The sensor devices are configured to monitor the targets and obtain information relating to deflections normal to the plane of the surface. The sensor devices are mounted close to each other and the line-of-sight of each sensor device is at a shallow angle to the plane of the surface. The system further includes processing logic configured to execute a shape reconstruction algorithm based on the information to determine the shape of the surface.