LiDAR is one of the key technologies for robots and autonomous cars to perceive the world around them, but today’s LiDAR components, such as lasaer pointer and sensors, are typically of large sizes. Laser radar innovator Voyant Photonics has come up with a different idea, with a system that can fit right on your finger, according to MCS.
Laser radar is often used for medium distance environmental perception, because the long distance application, radar has advantages; Close – up applications, ultrasound and other solutions are more compact. However, from a few meters to hundreds of meters, is the lidar stage.
Unfortunately, even today’s most compact lidar solutions are still about the size of a palm, and lidar ready for mass production for automotive applications are often larger in size. If lidar are small enough, they can be hidden in every corner of the car and even installed inside the car, providing rich location information about the car’s interior and all its surroundings. In addition, the smaller size also means lower power consumption without destroying existing circuits and designs. If it can achieve such a small size and power consumption, lidar will also enter a wider range of applications beyond cars.
Traditional mechanical lidar scans the scene several times a second and then measures its reflection to track the distance of the object. But such mechanically scanned lidar are usually large, slow and prone to failure, so innovative developers are experimenting with other technologies, such as Flash lidar, which instantly lights up entire scenes, or schemes that use super-structured materials to deflect beams of light.
The silicon photonics solution appears to be ready to compete in lidar, which essentially manipulates light on chips for a variety of purposes, such as replacing electrical nodes in logic gates to provide ultra-fast, low-heat signal processing. Voyant Photonics introduces a solution for applying silicon Photonics to lidar.
In the past, chip-based photonics have attempted to emit coherent laser beams from the surface of optical waveguides (the devices used to divert or emit light), but light tends to interfere with itself at close range, limited by low field of view and low power.
“Optical phased array” technology, developed by Voyant Photonics, works around this problem by carefully studying how to alter the phase of light waves passing through the chip. The result is a completely motion-free chip, smaller than a fingertip, capable of emitting high-speed, non-visible light over a wide range of environments.
“This is a breakthrough enabling technology that enables lidar to be so small,” said Steven Miller, co-founder of Voyant Photonics. “we’re talking about cubic centimeters here. There are a lot of electronics that simply can’t accommodate the softball-sized lidar that’s on the market right now, such as drones, weight-sensitive products, or robotics, which requires the lidar to be embedded in the tip of a robotic arm.”
Steven Miller and co-founder Chris Phare are at the Lipson nanophotonics research group at Columbia University. Michal Lipson, professor of electrical engineering at Columbia University, is one of the leading pioneers in silicon photonics.