Ultrafast laser beam offers less complex steer for autonomous cars

Researchers have developed a laser light sensing technology claimed to be more robust and less expensive than existing technology, an advance that could be used in autonomous vehicles.

The researchers at Purdue University and Stanford University said their innovation is orders of magnitude faster than conventional laser beam steering devices that use phased antenna-array technology.

The laser beam steering being tested and used by Purdue and Stanford is reportedly based on light-matter interaction between a silicon-based metasurface and short light pulses produced by a mode-locked laser with a frequency-comb spectrum. Such a beam-steering device can scan a large angle of view in nanoseconds or picoseconds compared with the microseconds current technology takes.

“This technology is far less complex and uses less power than existing technologies,” said Amr Shaltout, a post-doctoral research fellow in Materials Science and Engineering at Stanford who conceived the idea for the method. “The technology merges two different fields of nanophotonic metasurfaces and ultrafast optics.”