Laser-based light detection and ranging (lidar) plays a significant role in both scientific and industrial areas. However, it is difficult for existing lidars to achieve high speed, high precision, and long distance simultaneously. Here, we demonstrate a high-performance lidar based on a chip-scaled soliton microcomb (SMC) that can realize all three specialties simultaneously. Aided by the excellent properties of ultrahigh repetition rate and the smooth envelope of the SMC, traditional optical frequency comb (OFC)-based dispersive interferometry is heavily improved and the measuring dead zone induced by the mismatch between the repetition rate of the OFC and resolution of the optical spectrum analyzer is totally eliminated. Combined with an auxiliary dual-frequency phase-modulated laser range finder, the none-dead-zone measurable range ambiguity is extended up to 1500 m. The proposed SMC lidar is experimentally implemented in both indoor and outdoor environment. In the outdoor baseline field, real-time, high-speed (up to 35 kHz) measurement of a long distance of ∼ 1179    m is achieved with a minimum Allan deviation of 5.6 μm at an average time of 0.2 ms (27 nm at an average time of 1.8 s after high-pass filtering). The present SMC lidar approaches a compact, fast, high-precision, and none-dead zone long-distance ranging system, aimed at emerging applications of frontier basic scientific research and advances in industrial manufacturing.

Frequency-modulated continuous wave (FMCW) LiDAR can achieve long-distance and high-precision measurement, and the ranging error mainly comes from the nonlinearity of the laser frequency sweep. In this study, a high-precision silicon-integrated FMCW LiDAR is proposed. An equal frequency hypercube network is established by the stable free spectral range (FSR) of the microresonator to calibrate the nonlinearity of FMCW, and the distance matrix is obtained by analyzing the phase difference matrix of the FMCW signal. A standard length-based microresonator FSR calibration scheme is used to further improve the LiDAR accuracy. The feasibility of the scheme is verified by ranging and three-dimensional (3D) imaging. The ranging is carried out indoors and outdoors. In the indoor environment of a distance of 4 m, the minimum Allan deviation is 65 nm at 10.24 s. In the outdoor environment, the minimum Allan deviation at 438 m is 420 nm at 10.24 s. The 3D imaging can reconstruct the spatial point cloud of the objects and identify the spatial targets. This scheme has good on-chip integration capability and can be further combined with lens-assisted beam steering and optical phased array, laying the foundation for compact, large bandwidth, long-range, and high-precision LiDAR.

Traditional frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) LIDAR ranging is based on heterodyne detection, calculating unknown distance by extracting the frequency of the interference signal, while the main error source is frequency modulation (FM) nonlinearity. In this paper, a ranging system based on a microresonator soliton comb is demonstrated to correct the nonlinearity by sampling the ranging signals at equal frequency intervals, producing a ranging error lower than 20 µm, while at the range of 2 m. Advantages of fast data acquisition, light computation requirements, and a simple optical path, without long optical fiber, give this method a high practical value in precision manufacturing.

Since the dispersive interferometry (DPI) based on optical frequency combs (OFCs) was proposed, it has been widely used in absolute distance measurements with long-distance and high precision. However, it has a serious problem for the traditional DPI based on the mode-locked OFC. The error of measurements caused by using the fast Fourier transform (FFT) algorithm to process signals cannot be overcome, which is due to the non-uniform sampling intervals in the frequency domain of spectrometers. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a new mathematical model with a simple form of OFC to simulate and analyze various properties of the OFC and the principle of DPI. Moreover, we carry out an experimental verification, in which we adopt the Lomb–Scargle algorithm to improve the accuracy of measurements of DPI. The results show that the Lomb–Scargle algorithm can effectively reduce the error caused by the resolution, and the error of absolute distance measurement is less than 12 μm in the distance of 70 m based on the mode-locked OFC.

To realize high-accuracy posture measurement in large scale, a posture measurement system is proposed in this study based on a six-laser multilateral method, mainly composed of six laser tracers and three reflectors-a different number of laser tracers tracks each mirror. But in this state, the system is positive definite, and it cannot achieve the system parameters by self-calibration. To solve this problem, a stepwise calibration method to obtain the system parameters by three-step calibration is presented. Simulations and experiments are carried out to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. The experimental results show that the posture errors are distributed over [−13.6″, 6.6″] when the measurement range is [5 m, 7 m], which shows that the new measurement system has a high posture measurement accuracy in large scale.

We demonstrate an arbitrary distance measurement method by chirped pulse spectrally interferometry (CPSI) using femtosecond optical frequency comb (OFC). In this paper, the chirped fiber Bragg grating (CFBG) is used to investigate the mapping relationship between displacement and the center frequency of the chirped spectral interferogram. We overcome the direction ambiguity of dispersive interferometry (DPI) ranging and expand the range of distance measurement to 18 cm. Besides, we achieve a full range of dead-zone free ranging by introducing a variable optical delay line (VODL). And through principles simulation and experiment, it is demonstrated that the measurement accuracy is 12 µm in comparison with an incremental He–Ne laser interferometer and the minimum Allen deviation is 52 nm at an average time of 1.76 ms. Similarly, in the experiment with long-distance of ∼30m, the accuracy reaches 20 µm, and 2.51 µm repeatability is achieved under harsh environment.

To explore a new generation of ranging method suitable for industrial applications, in this paper, a spectral interferometry ranging method based on electro-optic (EO) comb is proposed. The mathematical model of EO comb and the principle of spectral expansion are analyzed in detail. Besides, the factors affecting the non-ambiguous range and resolution of the spectral interferometry method are also discussed. According to the theoretical analysis, the resolution of spectral interference ranging is mainly affected by the spectrum width of the optical frequency comb, and the non-ambiguous range is affected by the resolution of the optical spectrum analyzer (equal to the highest sampling rate of the optical spectrum analyzer). In the experiment, triple cascaded EO phase modulator is used to modulate a single frequency laser to generate more than 40 high-power sidebands. Then, the laser spectrum output from the EO modulator is expanded by single mode fiber and high nonlinearity fiber. Owing to the use of erbium doped fiber amplifier between the dispersion compensation fiber (single mode fiber) and the highly nonlinearity fiber, the polarization disturbance does not affect the spectrum width of the optical frequency comb significantly. However, the width of spectrum will be still affected by the phases of light, and the phases of light can be adjusted by the phase shifters in the front of the electro-optic modulators. Finally, the EO comb with a repetition frequency of 10 GHz and spectrum width of 30 nm is obtained. The EO comb can be used as the source of spectral interferometry scheme. Since the repetition frequency of the EO comb is high enough, which can meet the distortion-free sampling of optical spectrum analyzer. Hence, there is no “dead zone” in the measurement range. Besides, the equal frequency interval resampling algorithm and quadratic equation fitting algorithm are used in the data processing. Through the use of these algorithms, we can eliminate the measurement errors caused by non-equal frequency interval sampling of the optical spectrum analyzer and improve the ranging accuracy. The experimental results show that within the range of 1 m, the absolute ranging accuracy of 15 μm can be achieved at arbitrary position.

In precision machining, the surface geometry of a device is one of the important parameters that directly affects the device performance. This paper proposes nonequal arm surface measurement of femtosecond optical frequency combs (OFCs) using the Savitzky–Golay filtering algorithm, which uses the high spatial coherence of OFCs to realize high-precision, nonequal surface measurements. The Savitzky–Golay filtering algorithm and a high-order polynomial envelope fitting algorithm are used to smooth and denoise the interference signals to improve signal quality and measurement accuracy. The experiments are carried out under the condition of nonequal arms, and the results show that the repeatability is 28.6 nm for 20 consecutive measurements on the step surface of a 0.5 mm gauge block. The frosted glass surface is measured 20 times, and the measurement repeatability at the center position is 89.6 nm, which verified the system capability of nonequal arm high-precision measurement under different reflective surfaces.