A
laser rangefinder is a
rangefinder which uses a
laser beam to determine the
distance to an object. The most common form of laser rangefinder operates on the
time of flight principle by sending a laser pulse in a narrow beam towards the object and measuring the
time taken by the pulse to be reflected off the target and returned to the sender. Due to the high speed of light, this technique is not appropriate for high precision sub-millimeter measurements, where
triangulation and other techniques are often used.