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posted by Fnord666 on Friday January 06 2017, @09:37PM   Printer-friendly
from the let-there-be-light dept.

http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21712103-new-chips-will-cut-cost-laser-scanning-breakthrough-miniaturising

Smaller, cheaper lidars are being developed. One of the most promising comes in the minuscule form of a silicon chip. Prototypes have been delivered to several big automotive-component suppliers, including Delphi and ZF. If all goes well, within three years or so lidar chips should start popping up in vehicles.

[...] Typically, a lidar employs revolving mirrors to direct its laser beam, which is usually in the invisible near-infrared part of the spectrum, rather than the visible part. Commercial lidar can cost $50,000 or so a pop, but smaller, lower-powered versions are now available for $10,000 or less. A number of lidar makers, such as Velodyne, a Californian firm, are trying to develop what they call "solid-state" lidars, which are miniaturised versions with no moving parts. Some researchers are using a flash of laser light instead of a beam, and capturing the reflections with an array of tiny sensors on a chip.

Infineon, however, has taken a different tack and is using a micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS). This particular MEMS was invented by Innoluce, a Dutch firm which Infineon bought in October 2016. The device consists of an oval-shaped mirror, just 3mm by 4mm, contained on a bed of silicon. The mirror is connected to actuators that use electrical resonance to make it oscillate from side to side, changing the direction of the laser beam it is reflecting. This, says Infineon, permits the full power of the laser to be used for scanning instead of its light being dispersed, as it would be in a flash-based system.

The MEMS lidar can scan up to 5,000 data points from a scene every second, and has a range of 250 metres, says Ralf Bornefeld, Infineon's head of automotive sense and control. Despite its moving mirror, he thinks it should prove as robust and reliable as any other silicon chip. In mass production and attached to, say, a windscreen, the MEMS lidar is expected to cost a carmaker less than $250. These tiny lidars would have other applications, too—in robots and drones, for example.


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  • (Score: 2) by nethead on Friday January 06 2017, @10:08PM

    by nethead (4970) <joe@nethead.com> on Friday January 06 2017, @10:08PM (#450477) Homepage

    I could see this being great for a yard or lot security system that could tell the difference between a dog or a human. Maybe incorporated with a marked crosswalk to determine when it's really safe to cross. Any other ideas for a static mounting of LIDAR?

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  • (Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Saturday January 07 2017, @12:05AM

    by GreatAuntAnesthesia (3275) on Saturday January 07 2017, @12:05AM (#450511) Journal

    A laser mic app on your phone? A domestic system watching its users for gesture recognition, like the Kinect games system? I get the feeling something like this could be far more accurate than the optical tracking currently in use.

    What the hell happened to Kinect anyway? It was all the rage for about 3 weeks, then it feels like it dropped off the Earth. Was it just a fad? Was it too creepy even for the unwashed masses? Was it no good? Anyone still using those things?

    • (Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday January 07 2017, @12:47AM

      by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Saturday January 07 2017, @12:47AM (#450523) Homepage

      " What the hell happened to Kinect anyway? "

      Microsoft didn't open the API, and they didn't spin it off into another company which would have opened its API and continuously improved it as an open device. The Kinect, now, is something like the Power Pad [wordpress.com] for Nintendo, used for only 2 or 3 games.