Add Lidar Vision to Your Robot

Techniques that used to be available for multi-million defence projects only are becoming more affordable. Take lidar, short for Light Detection And Ranging, a 3D laser scanning method for mapping the environment. Initially intended for satellite tracking, today you can buy a miniature lidar for under €100. Add the software from this project and away you go (your robot, of course).

The word LiDAR, the ‘Li’ meaning ‘light’ indicates a device for optoelectronic echolocation. Instead of radio frequencies, the Lidar transmits a pulsed laser beam, the echo of which allows the determination of the distance of a reflecting obstacle. There is much talk these days of self-driving cars. Cheap Lidars with interesting characteristics are now available to anyone; they permit rapid development beyond the experimental stage.

The YDLidar X4 is a very affordable Lidar that is mainly intended for applications in robots. The software is targeted at Visual Studio 2010 and there are demo applications for Windows and Linux. All necessary libraries are freely available, of course. The Lidar measures 360 degrees around and detects obstacles from 12 cm to more than 10 meters.

Self-driving vehicles are a hot topic. But few people consider one of the biggest problems with autonomous vehicle technology: it’s designed mainly for use on properly mapped urban areas. What about when an autonomous vehicle must drive on a country road? MIT researchers are addressing the issue.

As some motorist have discovered the hard way, today’s automotive radar can’t see objects that a camera or lidar can see. Also, many radars operate at processing speeds that simply aren’t fast enough for the highway. Radar’s only saving grace is that it operates in all-weather conditions. Metawave Corp., spun out of PARC, a Xerox company based in Palo Alto, Calif., thinks it can alter what the automotive industry perceives as the “limitations” of conventional radars. The solution comes from metamaterials, small software-controlled engineered structures, laid out on a printed circuit board and able to steer electromagnetic beams in ways that were previously only possible with the much larger, powerful and more expensive systems.