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MIT and DARPA Pack Lidar Sensor onto Single Chip
- dharma1 10y agoawesome. Hope it won't take years to come to market
- neolefty 10y agoIt's still limited to use in the lab, or at least indoors, short-range: > At the moment, our on-chip lidar system can detect objects at ranges of up to 2 meters, though we hope to achieve a 10-meter range within a year. The minimum range is around 5 centimeters. We have demonstrated centimeter longitudinal resolution and expect 3-cm lateral resolution at 2 meters. There is a clear development path towards lidar on a chip technology that can reach 100 meters, with the possibility of going even farther. I wonder what the limiting factors are -- laser power, noise, calibration?
- regularfry 10y agoThat's immediately something that can be usefully put in a phone.
- csours 10y agoWhat do you imagine being done with it? I'm thinking of lidar room mapping
- TaylorAlexander 10y agoMobile robots used around people could absolutely use that tech today.
- mstresh 10y agoI believe that LIDAR will be to silicon photonics what the accelerometer was to MEMS. The real challenge that the article only touched upon is to get lasers into the same package and keep the costs down. This is still an active area of pursuit in both research and industry--though, there are several promising methods emerging. The $10 cost used in the article is likely closer to the cost of the bare silicon die. Packaging is always the expensive part of optics (doubly so if the lasers are not monolithically or heterogeneously integrated onto the same die). That being said, even with today's technology, integrating a laser chip and a silicon photonics chip into a package is easily south of $1k, which is what they quoted competing technologies costing. I look forward to seeing these sensors integrated into my self-driving car in 5-10 years.
- azernik 10y agoFrom this part of the article, the team seems fairly confident in their ability to integrate the laser onto the same die as the waveguides. This seems very plausible to me, given how standard this integration is in communications applications (eg fiber optic transceivers) > Our device is a 0.5 mm x 6 mm silicon photonic chip with steerable transmitting and receiving phased arrays and on-chip germanium photodetectors. The laser itself is not part of these particular chips, but our group and others have demonstrated on-chip lasers that can be integrated in the future.
- mstresh 10y agoThe Watts group at MIT has done some fantastic work into rare-earth doped silicon waveguides to produce lasers on a silicon platform [0]. However, I believe this work is still very much in the research stage. I'm not convinced their method is scalable to production for this $10 & million-unit-per-year LIDAR application since Erbium-doped waveguide lasers still require an off-chip pump laser source. [0] (PDF): http://www.rle.mit.edu/pmg/documents/OpticsExpress2014Bradley.pdf http://www.rle.mit.edu/pmg/documents/OpticsExpress2014Bradle...
- ChuckMcM 10y agoI was thinking the same thing. Even at 2 meter range with centimeter resolution, these devices would be a much better solution to the "local obstacle" problem than ultrasonics today. Mobile platforms moving around in spaces with a lot of miscellaneous obstacles have to either be compliant (or padded) enough to just push through them or slow enough to detect them and move around them.
- wlievens 10y ago> Packaging is always the expensive part of optics That's not always true, it depends on the die size. Bigger dies often means lower wafer yield for optical sensors.
- JoeAltmaier 10y agoSteerable? Could they create one that steers the laser emitters? And create a no-moving-parts scanning projection screen?
- neolefty 10y agoYes, they do non-mechanical beam steering: > They also have the potential to be much more robust because of the lack of moving parts, with a non-mechanical beam steering 1,000 times faster than what is currently achieved in mechanical lidar systems. The LIDAR chips don't use visible light, but the article talks about it as a future project: > We are also developing visible light phased arrays with applications such as Li-Fi and holography that can be seen by the human eye.
- regularfry 10y agoIt's a very simple, and very clever mechanism, too. My first guess was that they were going to use piezo mechanisms to squish cavities, but heat is even simpler.
- randyrand 10y agoYes, but your issues will be power output and heat. My projector is 250 watts and has a ton of cooling due to the light source and is still not all that bright. I can't imagine how difficult it would be to cool a 250 watt light source coming from a .3mm source. Probably impossible for the foreseeable future. Maybe microfluidic tubes would make it work. But then you have to have watercooling. It really dependson efficiency. Which I dont recall reading about in the ardicle. Or wait, did they say -6db loss I think? That would still be a ton of heat. Either way, I don't think this will be the breakthrough we need. Lenses are one of the cheaper components in a projector.
- MertsA 10y agoIt doesn't need anywhere near that much power. Each pulse is only a microsecond long and since it's all focused in a single beam it takes very little power. Even just a 1 W laser can be seen for miles and it can be a big hazard for pilots because people will try to shine them at the cockpit windows. Heat will definitely be manageable.
- calebm 10y agoFor those curious about performance: "At the moment, our on-chip lidar system can detect objects at ranges of up to 2 meters, though we hope to achieve a 10-meter range within a year. The minimum range is around 5 centimeters. We have demonstrated centimeter longitudinal resolution and expect 3-cm lateral resolution at 2 meters. There is a clear development path towards lidar on a chip technology that can reach 100 meters, with the possibility of going even farther."
- raverbashing 10y agoTesla will be looking very closely at these developments Edit: Finding the downvotes funny. Certainly nobody remembers how other self-driving cars are using LIDARs and what's the issue with current solutions
- TheOtherHobbes 10y agoSo will everyone else. This could literally be a game changer.
- rdiddly 10y agoYou mean like it takes checkers and literally changes it to chess?
- dharma1 10y agoMusk keeps saying radar+cameras is enough
- drcross 10y agoHe's only saying that because of cost and size. If you could add this package to a Tesla for 10 dollars per unit it would be stupid not to.
- dharma1 10y agoI agree. Unless that meant admitting old sensors aren't good enough, and recalling cars
- jonknee 10y agoMuch like Steve Jobs said no one wanted to watch video on a tiny screen until the day he introduced an iPod that could play videos. When LIDAR is cheap enough, Elon will forget all about RADAR and cameras.
- regularfry 10y agoIt's enough. This would be better.
- iandanforth 10y agoA similar technology that is much closer to market: http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/sensors/quanergy-solid-state-lidar http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/sens...
- TYPE_FASTER 10y agoSolid state lidar is here: http://www.quanergy.com http://www.quanergy.com They were talking $250 per unit for volume pricing.
- TaylorAlexander 10y agoQuanergy has yet to ship any production units. They've also been delaying for years. I have no doubt that they are building solid state lidar, but their tech isn't really "here" yet.
- Animats 10y agoI was wondering what happened to those guys. They announced another new model, but haven't shipped the first one yet. As of May 2016, they were talking 2017. Quanergy calls itself "The leading provider of LiDAR sensors" without having shipped a product. Bad sign. It's definitely possible, because ASC has been shipping such devices for years, but at a much higher price point. Somebody is going to get this right soon, but maybe not Quanergy. Those spinning Velodyne things have got to go. Too clunky, and too expensive.
- captaindiego 10y agoThey've got a normal lidar unit they are shipping or at least offering dev kits for now (similar to velodyne puck at a lower price point and less scanning lines). So they are at least doing something in terms of real products. From what I've managed to gather from poking around a bit, I'd guess they're using a very fancy waveguide based sensor similar to this, but a more simple emitter as a way to save cost on their first generation solid state product. I've heard also 2017 as well... but also would be curious to see any actual progress.
- TaylorAlexander 10y agoWe had one of the mechanical Quanergy sensors at my last job, and I worked on integrating it with ROS and doing some mapping with it. It was slow, not well constructed (it kind of vibrated when rotating), and didn't return intensity information (though it's possible a software update could change that). At $8000 (later dropped to ~$5600), it was poor value. I've never used a velodyne, but I looked over the marketing materials for the VLP-16 puck and it seems like a much more well thought out product. This makes sense as Quanergy is only selling mechanical LIDARs as a bridge, but the fact remains that they aren't very good.
- chiph 10y agoEven if this doesn't have the range for autonomous vehicle hazard avoidance, imagine it being used on regular cars for their blind-spot detectors. No more false alarms on your radar detector.
- jonknee 10y agoThat will be a good first step. As well as better automated parking features.
- doc_holliday 10y agoThe application of these light phased arrays to Holography and the making of a truly Holographic display with reasonable resolution is very exciting. This is to Holographic displays as LEDs was to standard displays.
- BatFastard 10y agoWould this work for doing hand position sensing? I love LeapMotion for VR, blows touch controllers away, and this sounds even better, smaller, faster, better resolution. Hell we could have them in our sunglasses and it could map the world around us as we walk. I want a shamanistic interface to D space!
- empath75 10y agoYeah, AR/VR was my first though.
- legulere 10y agoIt looks like it's small enough to be included in a smartphone. That would be pretty cool for crowdsourced streetview cartography like mapillary. Or 3D scanning objects.
- azinman2 10y agoI have a lidar question that maybe HN can answer. So this work is super cool and in the future I'm sure we'll have lots of lidar-based devices driving around. But if we do, won't they interfere with each other and thus render the lidars very inaccurate?
- Aelinsaar 10y agoIANAE but I would guess that it's the same for laser light as any other EM spectrum comms, in that modulation and some kind of packet system would work in tandem with limited range. It's probably not even as hard to manage as Bluetooth or WiFi, being far more directional as it is.
- IshKebab 10y agoI think not, because they rely on sending laser light in a specific directly, but also on receiving it from the same direction. The chances that another LIDAR system is looking at the exact same point a the exact same time is really low. At worst it would cause some outliers that you can filter.
- gene-h 10y agoNo, but the bigger issue may be from laser jammers[0]. Laser jammers are used to jam police speed lidars to prevent them from obtaining a reading on vehicles. Such devices are legal in most places, because the optical spectrum does not fall under the FCC's control. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_jammer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_jammer
- Animats 10y agoThis is very nice. Phased-array beam steering on both transmit and receive, and coherent detection to ignore any light that's not synced to the transmitter. Now they have to get the range up. If they can get range up to 10m in the near term, that's enough for indoor navigation. That will be useful for VR, AR, robot vacuum cleaners, and similar applications. I've been expecting the Advanced Scientific Concepts flash LIDAR to be the direction of the future, because it has no moving parts and works in sunlight at range. It just costs too much. But this is potentially even better.
- dmritard96 10y agoalways 'MIT ...'. their ability to brand is always amazing to me, otherwise its usually 'researchers'
- joelg 10y agoIt's a feedback loop, and a very effective one. The stronger the brand is, the more credibile your article will seem. The more credibile articles, the stronger the brand becomes.
- peter303 10y agoI saw a demo at SIGGRAPH last week with VR using helmet-LIDAR for model building and geolocating. It was the $8K spinning LIDAR you see on Google cars. Cant wait for the $100 version.
- augustt 10y ago$8K LIDAR? From what I can find, it sounds like Google is using a $70K LIDAR.
- Sephr 10y agoHow safe is it for our eyes if every single car on the road has multiple lidar units running?
- dharma1 10y agoDepends on the power and wavelength. 1400-2000nm is meant to be safer for retina, not sure what these lidars use
- skoocda 10y agoThis is incredible work. The low price point should create and burgeoning open source / hacker dev community, which in turn, will hopefully greatly accelerate 3D perception algorithms. My recent EE capstone project was in the area of autonomous vehicle SLAM perception and control- but we were limited by cost to using a PrimeSense Kinect for 3D perception, which had pretty lacklustre resolution. This chip-based LiDAR would have been warmly welcomed at the time. Regardless, I'm glad I'll be able to revamp the project when these hit the market! The more sensors, the better!
- logotype 10y agoMy holy grail toy is a Velodyne LIDAR, but damn these things are expensive :(