I-Corps: Non-mechanical scanning for laser ranging

The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project is the development of an incoherent light detection and ranging (LIDAR) system using non-mechanical beam steering with adaptive optical elements based on electrowetting optics. The proposed technology may enable a new generation of systems that are able to adapt to changing conditions and targets. The team will investigate applications such as mapping, agriculture, energy and environmental studies, and more recently, for autonomous navigation and collision avoidance for self-driving cars, drones, and satellites. These applications are all crucial to societal function today. For example, surveying the snow pack can be important for hydroelectric power and drinking water estimates. Other important applications include mapping coastlines as well as determining the health of agricultural crops and trees to predict yields as well as fire risks. Unlike conventional LIDAR systems, the proposed LIDAR design has operational lifetime orders of magnitude longer due to non-mechanical components. This I-Corps project is based on the development of an incoherent light detection and ranging (LIDAR) system using large angle nonmechanical beam steering with electrowetting optical components. The key innovation uses adaptive electrowetting optics, in which the shape of a liquid droplet to be controlled with applied voltage. This phenomenon enables electrically tunable lenses (variable spot size and divergence), prisms (variable steering), and custom-designed optical surfaces (variable wavefront). Two lenses, or a prism, can provide a small amount of steering (few degrees). When this is followed by a miniature fisheye lens, the result is a beam scanning system suitable for LIDAR. With a typical prism scan range of 5o, results have demonstrated nonmechanical beam steering through 180o in two dimensions using a system design with an adjustable spot size and the ability to make patterned beams at speeds of up to 200 Hz. In addition, the proposed technology uses a small ~mm-scale scanner (electrowetting devices and additional optics), low electrical power consumption (mW typical), good optical quality (comparable to fixed microlenses), ability to match a changing situation by tuning spot size and angle, and aberration compensation and adjustable spot size to track an object. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.