Project Acronym: LIANDRI
Full title: Advancing time-of-flight technology for high performance light detection and ranging
Project duration: 36 months
Coordinator: AIT Austrian Institute of Technology
Contact: Bernhard Schrenk (bernhard.schrenk@ait.ac.at)
Project website address: www.liandri-project.eu
Executive summary
Sensor technology plays a vital role in a wide range of applications, spanning from daily live appliances and sophisticated industrial environments to mission critical infrastructures. Photonics is known for enabling leaps in performance past that found in the state-of-the-art. A prominent example is time-of-flight imaging: By illuminating targets with light and acquiring the reflection thereof, a highly detailed 2D representation of the scene as well as depth information can be obtained. This is highly attractive for 3D sensor applications concerning object localisation, tracking and identification such as required for automated manufacturing or self-driving automobiles. Purely electronics-aided solutions such as ultra-sonic detection or RADAR technology experience flaws since either range or resolution cannot be achieved. Besides, state-of-play cameras lack reliability under certain conditions such as frontlighting. All these flaws of conventional sensors leave room for misinterpretation in an environment where ultra-high reliability is paramount.
LIANDRI aims at novel component technology for photonic sensing relying on light-based detection and ranging (LIDAR) with high precision and sensitivity. Time-of-flight photodetection enabled by CMOS-integrated 2D single-photon avalanche photodiodes in combination with GaN high-power optoelectronics for short-pulsed light generation in the GHz range will comprise the key elements for cost-effective direct image acquisition for long ranges of up to 250m at high precision and reliability. Developed sensor test-chips will be evaluated under realistic environments for the representative applications of automotive LIDAR and object tracking in confined manufacturing environments.
Final project summary
Sensor technology plays a vital role in a wide range of applications, spanning from daily live appliances and sophisticated industrial environments to mission critical infrastructures. Photonics is known for enabling leaps in performance past that found in the state-of-the-art. A prominent example is time-of-flight imaging: By illuminating targets with light and acquiring the reflection thereof, a highly detailed 2D representation of the scene as well as depth information can be obtained. Purely electronics-aided solutions such as ultra-sonic detection or RADAR technology experience flaws since either range or resolution cannot be achieved. All these leave room for misinterpretation in an environment where ultra-high reliability is paramount.
LIANDRI aimed at novel component technology for photonic sensing relying on light-based detection and ranging (LiDAR) with high precision and sensitivity. Time-of-flight photodetection enabled by CMOSintegrated 2D single-photon avalanche photodiodes in combination with GaN high-power optoelectronics for short-pulsed light generation in the GHz range and chip-scale optical beamformers will comprise the key elements for LiDAR applications.
In the case of autonomous driving, the use of LiDAR technology can expand the “digital horizon” of cars by seamlessly detecting objects in a range of more than 200 meters. The high resolution that can be achieved allows the identification of objects along the traffic infrastructure and thus increases the performance of future driver assistance systems. In LIANDRI, optical emitters for ultra-short light pulses in the 900 nm range, sensitive silicon single-photon detector arrays with monolithically integrated evaluation electronics and photonic beam shapers have been developed.
In industrial manufacturing environments, LiDAR technology allows for a high resolution in the millimetre range. This enables the precise localization of objects and tools and thus a higher degree of automation and greater efficiency of production systems. LIANDRI delivered a LiDAR-based solution at the size of a matchbox, augmenting handheld tools for industrial manufacturing.
