May 2018
Spotlight Summary by Dennis K. Killinger
3D pulsed chaos lidar system
A novel 3D pulsed chaos lidar system may significantly impact current 3D imaging lidar systems for the booming autonomous vehicle, surveillance, and robotic applications market. The new pulsed homodyned chaos lidar system has demonstrated 100 m detection range without range ambiguity, 3D images in real time, millimeter resolution, anti-jamming capabilities, and at low 10 mW class-1 eye-safe power levels. The lidar system uses a single-mode semiconductor 1.55 mm laser with homodyne interference optical feedback to produce a chaos laser signal that is then amplified by a pulsed erbium-doped fiber amplifier. The light is transmitted toward a distant target, and the returned lidar backscatter signal is detected and compared to the transmitted “random-noise-like” chaos signal. The system uses a two-axis MEMS mirror for active laser scanning of distant targets and has been tested in side-by-side comparisons with two commercial lidars (a conventional pulsed lidar and a random modulated CW lidar). The pulsed chaos lidar showed significantly better precision of 4 mm and a much longer detection range of 100 m. Because of the chaos-generated modulation of the gated transmitted pulse, each transmitted laser pulse is unique and its detection is much more immune to interference or jamming from other lidar systems, which is especially relevant to the scenario of tens of vehicle lidars in a crowded traffic situation.
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Article Information
3D pulsed chaos lidar system
Chih-Hao Cheng, Chih-Ying Chen, Jun-Da Chen, Da-Kung Pan, Kai-Ting Ting, and Fan-Yi Lin
Opt. Express 26(9) 12230-12241 (2018) View: HTML | PDF