“A camera’s accuracy depends very much on the lighting available. In this case, it failed. The radar system recognized the obstacle, but couldn’t locate it precisely and mistook the truck for a road sign,” says Werner Brockherde, head of the CMOS Image Sensors business unit at the Fraunhofer Institute for Microelectronic Circuits and Systems IMS in Duisburg.
The researchers have dubbed the new generation of sensors “Flash LiDAR.” They are composed of photodiodes developed at Fraunhofer IMS known as single photon avalanche diodes (SPAD) “Unlike standard LiDAR, which illuminates just one point, our system generates a rectangular measuring field,” Brockherde explains.
“The first systems with our sensors will go into production in 2018,” Brockherde says.
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| Fraunhofer LiDAR SPAD sensor |
