SBIR-STTR Award

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is to enable a cost-effective high-performance imaging technology with widespread commercial opportunities for industrial applications, such as autonomous navigation. The technology has the potential to greatly enhance the performance of autonomous navigation systems, enabling more precise detection of objects at further distances and enjoying greater robustness against environmental conditions. These capabilities help increase the safety of autonomous driving. The proposed technology is designed for manufacturability at low cost and high volume. Applications will benefit the defense, industrial, medical and scientific sectors, potentially bringing new opportunities in the areas of surveillance, security, remote sensing, machine vision, material surface characterization, biomedical imaging, as well as novel areas such as quantum imaging.This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project aims at developing a multi-pixel optical focal plane array (FPA) capable of coherent detection by leveraging photonic integrated circuit technology. Current conventional FPA technologies operate by direct photon detection wherein the incoming photons are converted into electron charges directly at each detection pixel. The measured signal is thus proportional to the intensity of the incident light. However, coherent detection measures both intensity and phase, with advantages including near-shot-noise-limited performance, background light rejection, and additional object information contained in the phase. The proposed technology will enable thousands to millions of coherent detection pixels to be fabricated monolithically on a photonic chip, enabling mass production. This research will result in a design of the coherent FPA with optimal detection performance and small form-factor.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.

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project is in developing technology that will enable the use of a 3-dimensional (3D) light detection and ranging (LiDAR) system in smaller and more economical drones for mapping, surveying, and navigation. The 3D LiDAR has important applications in environment management, forestry, land and corridor mapping, construction, land surveying, precision agriculture, powerline and infrastructure inspection, and countless other areas. The technology will bring significant economic impacts to the industries by reducing the ownership costs of a high-performance LiDAR system and the drone that can carry this system. The reduction of the entry-cost for LiDAR applications with drones will in turn benefit small businesses to perform smaller-scale projects in mapping and surveying. Other than drone-based applications, the innovation is poised to significantly reduce the costs and provide seamless integration of 3D LiDAR sensing in self-driving vehicles and other industrial applications including robotics, smart city infrastructure, surveillance, and security, as well as consumer applications like 3D sensing for augmented reality. The numerous applications enabled by the proposed project not will only help increase the economic competitiveness of the U.S. but also improve quality of life, security and safety.The proposed project aims at developing a high-performance, compact, and light-weight 3D LiDAR sensor to meet the increasing needs of drone-based, high-precision LiDAR applications. Current commercial high-performance drone-LiDAR systems are notorious for their high cost, bulkiness, heavy weight, and high power-consumption. Current drone-LiDAR systems are also prone to mechanical damage. These issues inevitably shorten the drone flight time, inhibit the installations of high-performance LiDAR systems on the more common consumer-grade small drones, and increase the operation costs. The proposed LiDAR sensor will mitigate all of these issues by leveraging a high-performance coherent LiDAR detection approach with silicon photonics technology in an innovative design. The coherent LiDAR detection method allows more sensitive measurements than the method used in most existing LiDAR systems. The technology achieves a longer detection range and larger number of returns given the same laser power. Based on highly scalable Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor (CMOS)-compatible silicon photonics technology, the LiDAR sensor is able to achieve high spatial resolution in a compact size. The entire system will have a form-factor similar to a palm-sized compact camera commonly used for photogrammetry in small drones. The solution requires no mechanical mechanisms for beam scanning nor high-precision alignment of optical components, making the system inherently durable, compact, lightweight, and power efficient.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.