Chinese University's New Lidar Technology Breakthrough

TapTechNews June 21 - TapTechNews learned from the School of Information and Communication Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China that the school's team first proposed a lidar instrument with a new demodulation mechanism based on the dispersive Fourier transform method, breaking through the cross-limits of measurement speed, accuracy and distance, and has unique advantages in the detection of low, slow and small targets such as drones. 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 University of Electronic Science and Technology of China uses the dispersive Fourier transform method to analyze the data information of the phase-locked vernier double-soliton laser comb, and through online pulse stretching, realizes full-spectrum interferometry-based measurement instead of 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.