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.
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