Tech Crunch | Jul 16th, 2019
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...
Spar3D | Sept 3rd, 2019
When developing lidar sensors – size (and cost) have always been an obstacle. Even the most advanced compact lidars, flash lidars and solid state sensors are not that compact. Sure, they are better than the massive, mechanical lidars – but what if you want to apply lidar to something smaller than a car?
“It’s a misconception that small lidars need to be low-performance,” explained Phare. “The silicon photonic architecture we use lets us build a very sensitive receiver on-chip that would be difficult to assemble in traditional optics. So we’re able to fit a high-performance lidar into that tiny package without any additional or exotic components. We can achieve specs comparable to lidars out there, but make them that much smaller.”
“This is an enabling technology because it’s so small,” said Voyant co-founder Steven Miller. “We’re talking cubic centimeter volumes. There’s a lot of electronics that can’t accommodate a lidar the size of a softball — think about drones and things that are weight-sensitive, or robotics, where it needs to be on the tip of its arm.”
In April, Voyant Photonics, a spinout of Columbia University in New York, raised $4.3 million to develop its solid-state lidar technology based on an optical phased array and a frequency-modulated continuous wave (FMCW) lidar engine...