Optimization of eyesafe avalanche photodiode lidar for automobile safety and autonomous navigation systems

Abstract

Abstract. Newly emerging accident-reducing, driver-assistance, and autonomous-navigation technology for automobiles is based on real-time three-dimensional mapping and object detection, tracking, and classification using lidar sensors. Yet, the lack of lidar sensors suitable for meeting application requirements appreciably limits practical widespread use of lidar in trucking, public livery, consumer cars, and fleet automobiles. To address this need, a system-engineering perspective to eyesafe lidar-system design for high-level advanced driverassistance sensor systems and a design trade study including 1.5-μm spot-scanned, line-scanned, and flashlidar systems are presented. A cost-effective lidar instrument design is then proposed based on high-repetitionrate diode-pumped solid-state lasers and high-gain, low-excess-noise InGaAs avalanche photodiode receivers and focal plane arrays. Using probabilistic receiver-operating-characteristic analysis, derived from measured component performance, a compact lidar system is proposed that is capable of 220 m ranging with 5-cm accuracy, which can be readily scaled to a 360-deg field of regard.

A year in review

“…Last year's top two downloaded papers by a wide margin were published as part of our special section on active electro-optical sensing: a review paper providing a historical perspective 1 and a laser radar design optimization for autonomous navigation. 2 Another top paper on flash lidar 3 was also part of this special section. Four additional top-downloaded papers were review papers on laser feedback interferometry, 4 head-mounted displays for air transportation, 5 terahertz photoconductive antenna technology, 6 and conformal displays.…”

Monolithically-Integrated Single-Photon Avalanche Diode in a Zero-Change Standard CMOS Process for Low-Cost and Low-Voltage LiDAR Application

“…Our SPAD achieves better or comparable PDP than others fabricated in non-standard processes in similar technology nodes. Such NIR-enhanced PDP characteristics are critical for LiDAR applications as many of them operate at 850 or 905 nm because of silicon compatibility, minimum absorption at free-space by water, and eye-safety issues [21]. Figure 7 shows a normalized histogram of time response based on time-correlated single-photon counting (TCSPC) technique, and the inset plots timing jitter, full-width at half-maximum (FWHM), as a function of V ex .…”

Gated2Depth: Real-Time Dense Lidar From Gated Images

“…Active imaging at long ranges is challenging because diffuse scene points only return a small fraction of the emitted photons back to the sensor. For perfect Lambertian surfaces, this fraction decreases quadratically with distance, posing a fundamental limitation as illumination power can only be increased up to the critical eye-safety level [51,54,60]. To tackle this constraint, existing pulsed lidar systems employ sensitive silicon avalanche photo-diodes (APDs) with high photon detection efficiency in the NIR band [60].…”

“…For perfect Lambertian surfaces, this fraction decreases quadratically with distance, posing a fundamental limitation as illumination power can only be increased up to the critical eye-safety level [51,54,60]. To tackle this constraint, existing pulsed lidar systems employ sensitive silicon avalanche photo-diodes (APDs) with high photon detection efficiency in the NIR band [60]. The custom semiconductor process for these sensitive detectors restricts current lidar systems to a single (or few) APDs instead of monolithic sensor arrays, which requires point-bypoint scanning.…”