University of Electronic Science and Technology of China Develops Advanced Lidar Instrument

TapTechNews on June 21, it was learned from the School of Information and Communication Engineering of the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China that the school's team has for the first time proposed a lidar instrument with a new demodulation mechanism based on the dispersive Fourier transform method, breaking through the cross-limitation of measurement speed, accuracy and distance, and has unique advantages in the discovery of low, slow and small targets such as unmanned aerial vehicles. The relevant paper was published in Nature Communications.

Paper link: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-49438-z

Lidar, as a powerful tool, can map spatial information in real time with extremely high accuracy and is widely used in industrial manufacturing, remote sensing, airborne and vehicle-mounted tasks. In the past two decades, the rapid development of optical frequency combs has improved the measurement accuracy to the quantum noise limit level.

The research of the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China uses the dispersive Fourier transform method to analyze the data and information of the phase-locked vernier double-soliton laser comb. Through online pulse stretching, full-spectrum interferometry is achieved, rather than the traditional time interferometry method or pulse reconstruction method to identify the pulse delay. This enables the accuracy of absolute distance measurement to reach 2.8 nanometers while taking into account a measurement distance of 1.7 kilometers. In addition, this method has the unique ability to completely eliminate the dead zone, which is especially conducive to the detection of small targets.