INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Lidar is a critical method by which robots and autonomous vehicles sense the world around them, but the lasers and sensors generally take up
a considerable amount of space
Not so with Voyant Photonics, which has created a lidar system that you really could conceivably balance on the head of a pin.Before getting
ultrasonics and other methods are more compact
But from a few feet to a couple hundred feed out, lidar is very useful.Unfortunately, even the most compact lidar solutions today are still,
roughly, the size of a hand, and the ones ready for use in production vehicles are still larger
A very small lidar unit that could be hidden on every corner of a car, or even inside the cabin, could provide rich positional data about
everything in and around the car with little power and no need to disrupt the existing lines and design
being swept across a scene multiple times per second, its reflection carefully measured to track the distances of objects
But mechanically steered lasers are bulky, slow and prone to failure, so newer companies are attempting other techniques, like illuminating
the whole scene at once (flash lidar) or steering the beam with complex electronic surfaces (metamaterials) instead.One discipline that
instance, to replace electricity in logic gates to provide ultra-fast, low-heat processing
Voyant, however, has pioneered a technique to apply silicon photonics to lidar.In the past, attempts in chip-based photonics to send out a
coherent laser-like beam from a surface of lightguides (elements used to steer light around or emit it) have been limited by a low field of
sidesteps that problem by carefully altering the phase of the light traveling through the chip
The result is a strong beam of non-visible light that can be played over a wide swathe of the environment at high speed with no moving parts
issues and uses a frequency modulated continuous wave technique, which lets it measure velocity as well as distance (Blackmore does this as
At any rate, their unique approach to moving and emitting light from the chip lets them create a device that is not only compact, but
expand and get this tech out of the lab and into the hands of engineers and developers
The exact specs, dimensions, power requirements and so on are all very different depending on the application and industry, so Voyant can
others are raising nine-figure rounds might seem daunting, Voyant has the advantage that it has created something totally different from
talking to big players in a lot of these places, drones and robotics, perhaps augmented reality
Contour Venture Partners, LDV Capital and DARPA, which naturally would be interested in something like this.
